Oracle owns “JavaScript”, so Apple is taking down my app
reddit.com
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http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=2416017&caseSearchType=US_...
Between this and Oracle's ongoing lawsuit against Google for their use of Java in Android, I have a pretty low opinion of Oracle.
I mean he dresses and grooms himself like the evil alternate universe version of a nice person. And everything I’ve heard is that he’s a horrible manchild.
https://givingpledge.org/Pledger.aspx?id=192
Something which only few persons choose to do
Feel free to dig into the details though if you want. Shouldn't be too hard to figure out where the rot is. :)
But rot, self interest? Not everybody can't do no evil. If he goes through with his pledge (which I assume) he will have done a lot of good. And he will have done it voluntarily. Doesn't make hime a saint, but...
(..almost ;-) - i'm joking; btw, did/will Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey give away such a substancial part of their wealth?)
I am convinced if there was a crossroads with a payout of x dollars for both choices, but with a pretty nasty outcome for the community for choice y as the distinguishing factor, Oracle would pick y in a heartbeat.
I think a good description for Oracle is "the demon that pulls everyone down to hell with them..."
In a big budget project, they had implemented a report, like sales per month or something similar. The requirement was to sort the result by month. Any sane person would sort it by the order the months happens in a year, like January, February, March, etc... But not Oracle: April, August, December, February, January, July, June, March, May, November, October, September.
Technically they are sorted... and they requirements only said sort by month. To get it fixed the customer had to pay Oracle more money, since they changed changed the requirements.
You won't find any argument here
Wasn't their inaction risking to lose the entire Java trademark by not defending it against Netscape? Does anyone know more about the history here?
What would Google do today if someone named their language DartScript? Or what would Apple do if someone released SwiftScript?
Pun unintended I guess, but still funny.
Visual J++ on the other hand was because Sun sued them over a Java implementation which wasn't actually compatible with Java, and misuse of the trademark, and all that kind of thing, so Microsoft weren't allowed to call it Java anymore. This ultimately led to the development of C#, so it was probably for the good in the long term, apart from some of the bits they copied from Java in what was presumably an attempt to make it more a direct alternative.
> The unauthorized display of our client's intellectual property is likely to cause consumers encountering this app to mistakenly believe that it emanates from, or is provided under a license from, Oracle.
I think most of us would agree that no, literally almost no one familiar with JavaScript would have believed that app to “emanate from, or be provided under a license from, Oracle”.
I know that Oracle owns Java, but I never would have guessed that they had any ownership of the JavaScript name. When I think of JS, Oracle is like the last company I would think of.
When I think of JS, I think of Brendan Eich, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, web development, Node.js, etc.
Google taught everybody a lesson, avoid Oracle products.
Although really Oracle should have the sense to see the state of the landscape and just drop it. It's become a generic term - in fact, it always was.
That way, they keep everything 'java' protected, without the poor PR of targeting the use of the term 'JavaScript'.
(IANAL.)
Which is fair-ish -- it should have never been named Javascript to begin with.
http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75026640&caseType=SERIAL_N...
Those Hawaiian islands aren't cheap, you know...
Being the #1 doesn’t mean you’re right. It just means your ads work.
Next time, just put "Disclaimer: I work for Oracle"
Where's the documentation for PeopleSoft which actually makes any sense? (I suspect the product itself no longer makes any sense, which would explain much).
It really feels like Oracle once had amazing technology but fell into the trap of an unmaintainable nightmare and have fallen back on the legal route to try to retain their dominance.
Unfortunately, while the community advantages of having a dominant interoperation mechanism are real - like having a common tongue - it rewarded the means of attaining dominance. A sales culture. A zero-sum game. It's not enough that I win, others must lose.
And here we are.
It's old school software selling, influence the decision maker and the job is done
I spent weeks and many back-and-forth emails and calls with AdWords support trying to explain that 1) our use of the term is well within Oracle’s guidelines, and 2) no, I am not going to contact Oracle to fill out a permission form for me.
It didn’t work. Not even with Level 2 support.
Thankfully, AdWords policy enforcement is completely random and nonsensical so I just duplicated the ads several times until one of them did not get flagged.
The only weapons Oracle has are vendor lock in and crushing competition with litigation.
My guess is Oracle would only do the latter, and that they're doing it because some lawyer thinks that Oracle has to do this to demonstrate that it is defending the mark even though that's nonsense if they don't go after notable unlicensed uses of their mark.
Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer.
"Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to a corporate lawyer."
Shall we call it Cryptonector's Razor? You invented it, you name it :)
edit: someone else (not me) should name the principle that explains why so few people on HN have any sense of humor whatsoever.
As to the HN-has-little-humor phenomenon, well, some people seem to think that dry == authoritative. That's BS, of course, but I don't know what to call that. I'll think about it.
I think lots of people have sense of humor, but it's accepted here in very limited amount (and preferably when it's clever humor). I'd attribute this to HN being one of the few remaining places on the Internet where you can discuss serious/interesting stuff without immediately drowning in effort-free jokes and memes - and people want to keep it that way. Hence, the word I'd be looking for might be "oversensitivity".
Are corporate lawyers not the physical manifestation of malice itself?
My wife is a corporate lawyer, so ive seen a little bit of these shenanigans from her perspective. And it pretty much boils down to this: there are certain risks lawyers can take and keep their jobs, and risks they will lose their jobs over. Like everyone else, they do not enjoy unemployment.
Saying “this business idea is fine, go for it” and it succeeds? They get no credit. Saying “I don’t think this is legal,” ugh, lawyers are always too cautious, but its par for the course sonit doesn’t reflect badly on them. Saying “go for it” and get nailed in an enforcement action? Unemployed and unemployable.
Likewise, when it comes to protecting IP, as required by law. They can’t -not- do it: it’s their job, explicitly, to protect the IP. Deciding “we will not pursue the correct course of legal action to (legally) protect our clients rights to protect their branding” isn’t in their purview, that belongs to the execs (who Are the ones that make those decisions). Any lawyer that decided that on their own? They’d better hope it -never- has -any- consequences, because... unemployed and unemployable.
It’s easy to blame lawyers for protecting their clients rights, but all they do is navigate the system. They don’t make the system[1], and they don’t pull the trigger
[1] there is a meme that lawyers build the legal system, as opposed to, you know, legislators, lobbyists, special interest groups, etc. I find it poorly related to reality.
Justice has always been for sale. What's happened is that the price has increased to the point where most of us can't afford it.
How to defend a trademark is also a business decision. Dollars to donuts says that Oracle's corporate lawyers have "defend Oracle IP" as a generic goal, and that they know that suing a big player over infringement of their JavaScript (tm) mark would be the sort of business decision that requires senior executive approval, but sending out cease&desist letters to nobodies almost certainly requires no executive approval. This is standard corporate organization and operation. But this too is how you get into PR problems, for example, and corporate lawyers don't really think about that.
Now, whether Oracle should or should not be taking these actions to defend the JavaScript (tm) mark -- I don't know. That's their business, and it's a business decision. That the law and courts don't look askance at small-scale enforcement of rapidly-becoming-generic marks is a completely separate problem for some other day. Corporate lawyers should make sure that this is what the business wants. If Oracle as a business has decided that this is what it wants, fine, and I'm ready to believe that they have, but I find it a lot easier to believe that this is just a small decision made by their legal department in something of a vacuum.
When I said “defend as required by law,” I meant “defend the IP in the specific manner dictated by our laws,” not that one is obligated to defend it at all. Eg, suing people to prevent IP from becoming generic is the defense that is recognized in our legal tradition - thus, if they are to defend it, the conservative must follow this route.
It's absolutely clear that suing, say, Google, over JavaScript mark misuse would be a big deal business decision at Oracle, while sending a cease&desist letter over some piddly app in the iOS store is almost certainly not. But there is a cost to the latter, in that it destroys goodwill to be overly and unnecessarily aggressive in enforcement of a mark that arguably is now generic. This should be a business decision, not a legal one.
If Kleenex = Java and Kleenex Dispenser = javascript, your argument is wrong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8d0bg2/oracle_o...
Kleenex = JavaScript
Kranky Kim's Kleenex Keeper = Blue Mountain JavaScript Percolator
Kleenex is probably a bad example, because Kleenex has actually defended their trademark. At least I don't think Kranky Kim could actually use Kleenex in her product name.
I think the legal argument for the genericized meaning of "javascript" is valid and could be argued, in that you ciuld show that it's reasonable for anyone to think it was merely a noun and not a trademark. But the argument would take more years and money than any individual developer has.
Which begs the question: Is there any such thing as a class action but for defense instead of lawsuit? Oracle could snuff out a million app developers individually without ever even having to so much as appear once in court. Just send these letters. But could a million developers act as a class in a defense the way they could in an action?
The community would call the FOSS build system "snot" and the linter "nosebleed".
LEGO is the singular and the plural form. Thus "a LEGO brick" and "the LEGO bricks" are valid sentences. That's why some choose to correct Americas on their use of "legos." It has nothing to do with trademark law.
It's not quite the same as sheep/sheeps. Saying "there are 2 sheep in the field" is fine but saying "there are 2 Lego on the floor" still sounds a bit weird. You would have to use "there are 2 Lego bricks on the floor".
It's because Lego is an uncountable noun, like rice or sand. E.g. "there are 2 grains of rice on the floor" is fine but "there are 2 rice on the floor" is not. Saying "there are 2 rices on the floor" sounds very bad, and is the equivalent to using "Legos" instead of "Lego bricks".
Adobe is worried about protecting Photoshop as people use the word as a verb for editing photos in other apps. Kimberly-Clark is worried about protecting Kleenex as people use the word as substitute for other tissues (at least in the U.S.) And Velcro is worried about protecting their namesake (it’s a hook and loop).
People don’t typically confuse other scripting languages or web technologies for JavaScript. The reason Oracle cares here is not to protect the JavaScript brand. Instead, it’s to protect the Java brand, which people do confuse with other languages (or at least with JavaScript).
The unauthorized display of our client's intellectual property is likely to cause consumers encountering this app to mistakenly believe that it emanates from, or is provided under a license from, Oracle.
(I have my doubts regarding that probability, but that's a different matter)
I stand by my original comment. There's nothing overboard about it, and nothing demanding absolute certainty.
ref: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Ahem, "LiveScript": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#History
Fortunately the ES shorthand is more workable (e.g. ES6, ES2017, etc).
From the brilliant "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages": http://james-iry.blogspot.co.il/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and... .
I'm just going to call it ES or ECMAScript from now on. If enough people do it the matter will be settled.
Okay.
Yes, but only after:
> Would he be required to pay a fee?
Yes, it's Oracle. It will be a hefty one.
The app was written long time ago and I'm surprised to receive an email from Apple about it at all.
Here is the link so you can see how it's shown in the App Store, I don't think anyone would associate this app with Oracle!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/html5-css-javascript-html-sn...
That's completely different than using the word JavaScript to describe your product.
It's also different than using the word JavaScript in an open source project, such as a github repository.
---
Also, everyone is assuming that Oracle has demanded this. It could be that some over-eager lawyer at Apple set up a rule which says that any trademark cannot be in the name of an app. Until I hear some evidence that Oracle demanded this, I think this is an Apple issue. Can you sell an app with this name on Google Play?
The key idea in trademark disputes/claims is that you are probably ok as long as your mark isn't confusingly similar to a widely known valid mark by another entity/owner. So if your Javascript app has nothing whatsoever to do with the programming language or computer in general, Apple shouldn't take down your app.
Eons ago Apple Computer was sued by Apple Corp (Beatle's record label) for trademark infringement. I wouldn't be too surprised if the Steve's deliberately named their computer company after the Beattles's corporate creature, being that Jobs was an ardent Beatles fan. They settled and agreed not to enter each other's business (ie, music and computer), so as not to confuse consumers. Apple is a bit hypocritical in this regard though -- in one trademark lawsuit, the company sued a mom-and-pop grocer in Poland whose website, A.pl, Apple claimed, violated Apple's trademark, not too long ago and was criticized for their insanely absurd legal tactics.
Just received this email from Apple about my app(Html, css, javascript snippet editor).
In other words, it appears to be an app that's an IDE for various syntaxes, and JavaScript is one of them. IMHO (not a lawyer, but just observation) simply mentioning a trademark in reference to your product having something to do with it is completely legit. Otherwise we'd be seeing companies like Apple go after all the smartphone case manufacturers that mention "iPhone" since that's what their product is for.
Apple does that. They have a "Made For i" accessory program, and go after third-party accessory distributors (not manufacturers) who use their trademarks without permission: https://developer.apple.com/programs/mfi/
Definitely not the hard part of maintaining a legacy dynamically-typed application. And I'd say it's the most trivial part.
And your assertion suggests that it's somehow rare to have to maintain code? I'm sure the person you replied to has maintained code for more than a year and is drawing part of their post from that experience.
I've worked on a Node application with express, underscore and redis (we didn't need a full DB -- name value pairs were fine). I'm not even sure if using express is worth it. In our case it stayed completely out of our way, so I can't really complain. My only regret was using jasmine for testing. I would definitely use mocha these days. For server side, just use Node modules and ES6. No need to complicate it with transpilers, build tools, etc, etc.
Ironically, client side is much more of a hassle (I still haven't found a build tool that I think is worth using).
Edit: looks like he was suggested this in the Reddit thread and thought it was a good idea.
And Sun requested the name change:
in early December, Netscape and Sun did a license agreement and it became JavaScript. And the idea was to make it a complementary scripting language to go with Java, with the compiled language.[1]
So it's kind of the opposite of chickens coming home to roost. More like a term plan finally paying off.
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2653798/application-develo...