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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

If you write a book and I only copy the title and chapter names, but fill in my own story, did I violate your property rights?

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This is a bad analogy. You don't need to copy title and chapter names to allow other people to "interoperate" (read, scan, and index I guess?) with the book. Moreover substantial creativity goes into title and chapter names. Both of which imply they should be substantially more copyrightable than APIs.

> This is a bad analogy. You don't need to copy title and chapter names to allow other people to "interoperate" (read, scan, and index I guess?) with the book.

Bad analogies are inevitable, and aren't the commenter's fault. It's the Federal Circuit's fault, for trying to blur the lines between functional matters (the domain of patents) and copyright matters. Any analogy that's simple enough to quickly understand will suffer from basically this same flaw, or else not apply to this case.

Software is both patentable and copyrightable, so there's no blurry line here. You are trying to say it's blurry, but it's quite clear.

Oracle's trying to get copyright duration on the exclusive rights to something that falls under patent subject matter, so yeah, they're blurring the lines.

Ultimately, the problem for Oracle is that the APIs are too functional to be eligible for copyright protection, too abstract to be eligible for patent protection, and too generic to be eligible for trademark protection. But that doesn't stop them from trying to get the best features from all the above.

A better analogy (i think) is a city that has in its constitution "streets and building locations must be in the exact same spot and have the exact same purpose as they are in neighboring City B (eg a coffee shop must be on the corner of 2nd & 3rd, but which coffee shop it is doesn't matter as long as it does the same thing as the coffee shop in City B)".

I object! Irrelevant, due to false analogy.

Um, you started that analogy...

Um, no. I said, "If I write a book" the respondent said, "... write a title and chapter names..."

One is an accurate analogy, the other is a false analogy.

Who decides when an analogy is more accurate? You? An analogy will never be perfectly accurate by its nature.

Your analogy is false. Google didn't copy the whole thing; they copied the API. THat's analogous to copying the chapter titles but not the chapter contents, far more than it is analogous to copying the whole book.

No, it's more analogous, but worse so, IMO, to copying all the sentences of the book in a manner like this:

"Jack and Jill ran down the hill."

into

"Gil and Jacky descended the mound."

It's exactly the same story just with different implementations that exhibit the same behavior. They didn't make something compatible with Java -- they replaced Java with something exactly like Java.

It's even worse than the example above, because they kept the same names of the classes, interfaces, etc.

They had to keep the same names of classes, interfaces, etc. in order to copy the standard library’s API. And it’s not illegal to copy the titles of chapters and write your own story. Even if they’re very similar, if you do it properly (no peeking at original), there’s nothing illegal about it.

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