Is it Oracle's position that all implementations of the Java APIs (or partial implementations) are illegal, unless it's specifically allowed by Oracle?
That sounds ludicrous. What about unit testing libraries, for example?
That sounds ludicrous. What about unit testing libraries, for example?
That said, Google should have licensed Java when the good guys were around. Now they are dealing with bloodsuckers :)
This case is more about fair use. Is Google's usage of the Java APIs fair use, or a copyright infringement?
Having said that, IANAL and I could easily be wrong. This is not legal advice.
The real question (which seems already to have been answered) is are APIs a copywritable work, and if so is an implementation that follows the API a derived work? So is it an infringement if I simply implement the API? The original court decision said it is not an infringement, the appeal said it is and the supreme court decided not to hear a further appeal. That's why we are left with a fair use defence.
This is quite spectacularly bad for the industry IMHO, but there is not much we can do about it now other than to have US citizens lobby congress to pass a new copyright law (which seems pretty unlikely). If it turns out to be fair use, that will make it slightly less bad. However, expect rent-seekers to start coming out of the woodwork to sue for implementations of specifications anyway. They know that they can simply sue you for less money than it will cost to defend yourself with a fair use defence. Expect this to be the new patent troll.
It's only bad for the industry as it exists today. Tomorrow hopefully when Oracle wins this as it appears to be a slam dunk, libre software becomes the norm rather than the Frankenstein's monster that Android is. I would either do it all in-house as Apple did with iOS or if you want to create a derivative work, use GPL'd code. Google didn't want to do the hard, time consuming work of API design. If it was the easy part, why didn't they do it?
Open and shut case in favor of Oracle. And after a rough adjustment period, I think it will promote Free Software to new heights industry-wide when they win.
Even GNU is now in jeopardy because who the heck owns the copyright for POSIX??? Is there any license language in the specification saying that you can implement it? I have been too scared to look up until now. This is incredibly important because all of the GNU tools and the Linux kernel have been implemented independently and are not derivations of things like BSD.
No. This is a nightmare for free software because it means that every single RFC in existence now needs a license thanks to copyright lasting for the life of the author plus 95 years. It means that we can never interoperate with services that choose not to grant a license to their API. Even if you reverse engineer it, expect a lawsuit having to defend yourself using a fair use defence.
And if you live in most of the world that doesn't have fair use. Well, you are just screwed.
The only thing this means is that free software will be marginalized. We'll be set back 20 years.
But I did want to clarify one thing you said because I found it confusing.
> The GPL is a license that depends on accepting the license -- or not. It is always acceptable not to accept the license and write your own.
If you do use GPL code you have to also license it as GPL. Any derivative work you create containing even a smallest portion of the previously GPL licensed software must also be licensed under the GPL license. That's what Google meant when they called it infectious and viral. Unfortunately for these large corporations, it was also the solution (other than doing the heavy lifting in-house as Apple did).
When you don't accept GPL'd code, you write your own code and license (or adopt another).
I believe this was one of Google's initial arguments, but as the DoJ stated when they weighed in:
>"The Android platform uses the Java programming language, but [Google] purposely designed Android not to be compatible with the Java platform or interoperable with Java programs." [1]
[1] http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/05/us-dept-of-justice-finds-...
What I don't understand is WHY Oracle wants to go through with long legal battle. They make good revenue on their database ecosystem as well as some other products of dubious value (has anyone ever enjoyed Oracle EBS?). They've secured their interests in Java on the serverside, android is not a threat there.
Is this REALLY all about monetizing their purchase of Sun Microsystems? Seems like a round-about way to make money and it certainly carries a lot of risk.
I'm guessing that Oracle is looking at the short term gains and ignoring the long term impacts. Business as usual in the corporate world. :/
Sun's documentation specified that the APIs were copyright, and in an email on March 24, 2006, Andy Rubin wrote that: "Java.lang apis are copyrighted ... Sun owns the brand and ip [and} Sun gets to say who they license the tck to" (edited for clarity).
That was before Sun went open source.
By 2007, Google was making serious efforts to "scrub" its code for references to Java. In 2010, it said the "bad words" were "Java, License and Patent".
On April 9, 2008 Google's Alan Donovan wrote an internal email to java-users@google.com explaining how to turn off "Sun proprietary API" warnings issued by the Java compiler.
http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...
It's pretty clear that (a) Google knew it was using copyright materials and (b) trying to conceal the fact, rather than taking out a license.
On May 9, 2014, the Federal Circuit court ruled that the Java APIs are copyrightable.
https://www.eff.org/files/2014/11/10/oracle_v_google_13-1021...
Arguing that bad laws are bad does not stop them from being laws....
Better analogies would be Harmony (what Android used) or GNU Classpath.
They did not go after those, one presumes, because those projects don't have billions of dollars to be sued for.