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monocasa

I wonder who owns SQL. I hope IBM has been asking them this as well.

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> "I wonder who owns SQL."

I don't know what it would mean for someone to "own SQL". It's an ISO standard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#Interoperability_and_stand...

What does being an "ISO standard" have to do with anything? The law does not make exceptions for things the ISO chose to standardize.

In fact, if Oracle is right, the ISO is likely violating the copyright of the original authors of SQL by even publishing that standard.

Almost certainly IBM was a major contributor to the SQL standard. Since the entire point of a "standard" is to encourage third-party adoption, so it would rather difficult to sue anyone, imo.

Sun set up a certification process for Java, but specifically had different rules for mobile applications, because that's where they were trying to make money. Not that I agree with Oracle's argument, but it was very willful on Google's part to avoid licensing.

tldr; SQL is not analogous to Android.

I'm not sure, but as far as I know there isn't any way to accidentally grant a license to copyrighted material. Even if there is it is almost certainly all sorts of things that everyone but IBM really won't like, for instance, revokable.

And of course no one thought to ask for a real license, because no one thought it was copyrightable.

Willful on Google's part to avoid licensing is sort of synonyms with saying Google willfully complied with the law... I'm not sure how it's relevant.

It is the most relevant thing when judges started disagreeing with Google's take on the law. Sun wanted money for X, Google didn't want to pay for X. (And IBM didn't want money for SQL.)

The only thing it could possibly be relevant for is if Google tried to argue that they accidentally copied the sequence structure and organization of the API. No one is arguing that. Of course that was intentional.

It definitely isn't relevant to the rest of this discussion... you're comparing the attitude of the producer of the allegedly copyrighted material in one case to the attitude of the infringer of the allegedly existing copyright in another.

Well, Google is probably going to have to pay Oracle a lot of money, so I guess you can wander around mumbling about relevancy, despite whatever facts are noted by the courts.

Quite often the patent and intellectual property right issues are given a though during the standardization process. It might be for example that companies contributing to the standard are required to agree to license their IPR related to the standard under certain conditions.

The reason is to prevent cases where company first submits something to the standardization body and then tries to extort money from others trying to implement that standard.

This of course is not a foolproof mechanism. There could be for example companies not participating in the standardization who hold significant IPR in the field. Certainly the policies between standardization bodies differ. Not sure how the ISO/IEC handles these issues.

Yes, but the problem is no one thought this was copywritable material, so while they probably did try to avoid issues like this I'd actually be shocked to find out they did license any copywrite that may exist.

So is Java, but here we are.

https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-wins-java-iso-approval/

> So is Java, but here we are.

> https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-wins-java-iso-approval/

That article describes when Sun was recognized as an official submitter for a proposed standardization of Java. It later withdrew.

> "In 1997, Sun Microsystems approached the ISO/IEC JTC 1 standards body and later the Ecma International to formalize Java, but it soon withdrew from the process."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#Hi...

Java is not an ISO standard.

The standard process is orthogonal anyway.

Orthogonal to what? The point is there is no "owner" of SQL in the way Oracle claims to own the Java API.

How can an ISO standard grant access to a form of property that no one even thought could exist until decades after the ISO standard was written?

I can no longer follow what you're arguing, nor do I think you're considering what's been presented to you. Have a good day.

I'm saying that ISO standards have might have no bearing on copyrightablity of APIs, or enforcement of that copyright. Copyright was never intended to protect against use in any implementation like Oracle's argument for API copyrightablility here. The idea of copyright at the time was protection against strict copying of the same (or close enough) implementation, and therefore ISO standards don't really protect against copyright claims.

At the very best it's extremely grey area in the law.

ISO standards annoying are copyrighted with DRM (your pdf copy has your personal email in it, so they would know who shared it IIRC) — but have a policy that any patents must be disclosed and reasonably licensable.

IMO that’s not necessarily DRM, so much as just a watermark. Although one could argue they are using it to manage their rights digitally, hence DRM.

You are not telling the truth - Java is not an ISO standard. Sun talked to both ISO (the linked article) and ECMA but a standard was never created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase

Sybase wasn't founded until five years after Oracle DB's first release.

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