Google files opening Supreme Court brief in Oracle v. Google copyright lawsuit
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blog.google
IBM sponsored and was the primary contributor of resources to an independently developed Java work-alike called Apache Harmony. (about JDK 1.5 level, IIRC) Apache Harmony was, naturally, under the Apache license.
Google wanted something like Java for Android, so Google used Apache Harmony.
Sun was okay with Google having something like Java in Android and had said so. (perhaps reluctantly)
Oracle sees Sun for sale, and envisions a big "sue google" sign on Sun's back. Oracle buys Sun, to get Java and sue Google. Very soon after acquisition this becomes apparent. James Gosling leaves Oracle for reasons that were not quite clear at the time, but soon become clear.
Oracle claimed Google had used Java code. But Android had Apache Harmony.
So Oracle changes its argument to . . . But the APIs!!!
(Groklaw had documented all this back in the day.)
Although I do wish Google tried harder to press the point that, based on Oracle's argument that copying the API infringes copyright, Oracle itself is in violation of others' copyright. Ars Technica has an example of that (Amazon's AWS), and the brief does give a vague allusion to this fact, based on what I presume is the trial records:
> Notably, Java SE itself “reimplements” interfaces from earlier programming languages. JA154-157; see also JA211.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be...
Also Google could have bought Sun and own Java, apparently they did not, as they thought they could get away with it.
That isn't how things went according to Gosling.
"Triangulation 245: James Gosling on Oracle vs Sun"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be...
If Google actually cared, they could have bought Sun and own Java.
When it gets to the subject of APIs, Gosling is suddenly a lot less accusatory. Here's the actual conversation:
> Host: "I would hate to see a law or ruling that APIs are copyrightable, because that would have a chilling effect across the whole --"
> Gosling: "Yeah, that would be bad. But it kind of feels like the lawyers and laws and legal teams -- they do what they can."
But our laws don't punish companies for being mean, and issues around Google's actual clean-room implementation are largely irrelevant at this point in the lawsuit. It's pretty clear that Oracle bought Sun with the intention of going after Google far more aggressively and on far more legally tenuous grounds than Sun was ever interested in doing.
Are they? I am not an expert on this, but isn't the fact of actual copying (rather than successful clean-room implementation) a very relevant piece of information for copyright?
Oracle is claiming that the organization of constants/methods in packages as well as the method signatures are copyrighted - they are arguing that it doesn't matter if you have a clean room implementation of BufferedInputReader() if you put it in java.io (like Oracle's JRE) and gave it the same signature as Oracle did, then you're infringing on their copyright.
If this SCOTUS broadly rules in Oracles favor, this would kill many projects, including WINE (which implements Microsoft's Win32 API without copying)
This appeal is strictly about the copyrightability of APIs. The supreme court generally doesn't address cases as a whole, but specific issues brought up to it on appeal.
If I remember the decisions on the actual copying part of the case correctly, it was decided that Google copied something like a dozen lines of uninteresting code directly (not api's, just some method implementation), and that this was de minimis copying and didn't constitute infringement. You should check if you really care though, I might be wrong.
And neither did the parent implied he was. He is merely stating Gosling wasn't OK with Google using Java without paying a dime, but didn't have much of a choice.
Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle (2010): https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling...
God I miss SUN and SGI- all those pretty computer chassis....Oracle basically is a lawyer who murdered SUN and wears their rotting flesh around pointing at people and yelling THEIF!
Yes, IBM did one bid but they withdrawn it shortly thereafter.
• The list of all Oracle vs. Google filings (up to the site's closing), with links to articles that mention them. Not all filings had corresponding articles: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=OracleGoog...
• The list of all articles related to Oracle vs. Google, in reverse-order (newest at the top): http://groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=archives&year=...
PJ, wherever you are, I hope you're doing well!
(Edited: Removed characters that messed up formatting)
no donkey in this race but how sure this is not you and your circumstances rather than the site itself? Living in certain countries my ISP used to inject all sort of nonsense into every unencrypted site they could.
Anyone not using tls these days is intentionally exposing their readers to harm, which you seem to be experiencing.
Personally I won't view such sites on principle and block them with https-everywhere, though guessing many others do allow it, due to being the default setting worldwide.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:RhVEwm...
Is there a reason it's not a round number?
If the NSA -- and other state / state-like actors -- are omnipotent, and can always find you through your email, etc, you either have to stop what you're doing or be willing to deal with being caught or exposed.
If they aren't all-powerful, but people stop using email to communicate and stop carrying out their business because of the belief they are, that also serves the same purpose as catching or exposing the people in question -- it stops their activities.
This reminds me of the idea behind WikiLeaks -- not just to expose the leaked documents, but to make it so costly to carry on secret communications and operations that people stop trying.
GL was one of the best daily reads there ever was.
At a minimum, it will cover the briefs of both sides, and maybe some amici briefs, in an argument preview; then a summary of the oral argument in an argument analysis; and then a final summary of the ruling in an opinion analysis.
I still occasional think about it and wish it was around to illuminate contemporary issues.
If you have recommendations for a similar source of writing/insight please let me know.
Here is a partial list of other groups who have already filed motions in support of Google: Microsoft, EFF, Python Software Foundation, Mozilla, RedHat, (see the docket for a complete list).
In addition their was a very interesting brief submitted by a bunch of famous computer scientists, instead of an organized company. The names attatched included Edwin Catmull, Alan Kay, Brian Kernighan, Bjarne Stroustrup, Andrew Tanenbaum, Ken Thompson, Guido van Rossum, Steve Wozniak. The total list of people is 78 long and they are all of similar caliber (though I did pick out the names I had the strongest recognition for), see their brief: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-956/89487/20190...)
This case isn't about Google making or loosing some money, Google being open or not. None of the amici care about that, the supreme court doesn't care about that. Only Google and Oracle care about that. This case is about the law that governs us all and what effects it has on us all.
And yes, Microsoft is agreeing with the EFF in a lawsuit...
... I don't think there's much support here for Oracle winning on its claims.
But this particular subthread was pointing out the hypocrisy of Google trumpeting "Openness in all cases!"
These are two separate and unrelated topics. We can simultaneously support Google winning the case (for the outcome on case law) while also believing Google could be a better corporate steward of open source (mostly looking at you, Android).
> Android's source code does not contain the device drivers, often proprietary, that are needed for certain hardware components. As a result, most Android devices, including Google's own, ship with a combination of free and open source and proprietary software, with the software required for accessing Google services falling into the latter category.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#AOS...
Those proprietary drivers are specific to the myriad of hardware that the OEMs are running the OS on. You can still run Android on any hardware you have the drivers for, or emulate it in a virtual machine.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
Both do amazing things with and for the open source community, but Google definitely got the benefit of being The large open source company.
More competition is heathier for the entire ecosystem. Especially when it spurs executive-level attention towards continued openness.
That's not incompatible with openness if they are largely amassing a defensive patent portfolio. A desire for openness does not mean unilateral disarmament in the face of enemies who are very willing to use every status quo legal tool to.prevent openness.
What they're doing is trying to make it so that nobody can sue Google over something Google is doing using patents, because Google already patented it.
https://www.google.com /search?hl=en&q=<query>
Actually it's possible that they copied that interface from someone else, basically every search engine uses the same one, it's how your browser url bar works.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-go...
This is a complete red-herring. Patents are not what this case is about. Openness or cuddliness is not what this case is about.
The reality is that Google is in the right because Oracle is willing to set fire to the norms and standards that were developed over the last 50 years just because they want to squeeze more money out of Java.
If Google was so interested in Java, they could have made a bid to own Java.
Guess what, they would not have been sued and control its destiny.
With Google at the steering wheel I bet Java developers would still be enjoying Java 6.
The entire industry would be worse off today if our legal policy on APIs was, "they're copyrighted, but don't worry, you can just buy out companies you want to interop with." Imagine how much smaller and how much more uninteresting the tech world would be.
Any company that wasn't the size of Google couldn't have bought Sun, and any company, even companies smaller than Google, should be free to interop with the Java APIs the same way that Google did. Discussions about whether or not Google could have bought Sun are meaningless to me, I don't think they have anything of value to add to the current case, and I don't think they have anything to do with Oracle buying Sun with the sole intention of suing someone else.
You're replying to a thread where someone complains about Google excessively filing patents as a defensive/offensive measure, and your argument is that Google should also be excessively buying companies as a defensive measure against lawsuits?
Maybe. Maybe not. But just to be clear, if all this case was about was Oracle trying to extract some money from Google, it would be nothing but a curious sideshow.
What Oracle is doing goes way beyond Java. They are trying to set an insane precedent and that has never existed in our industry, and had it existed it would have drastically reshaped it to the extent that it would be unrecognizable today. The implications of Oracle winning would be far reaching and unknown.
It's counterproductive to drag a company over purity while it's currently the primary fighter against an existential threat. It's polishing silverware while the house burns down around you.
Yes, Google could do better (particularly on patents). Yes, some of Google's arguments are hypocritical. But openness is a continuum, not a binary state, and it's not helpful to turn away imperfect allies at this time.
Direct link to brief: http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-956/127663/20200...
Schedule:
Petitioner’s (Google) brief: January 6, 2020
Respondent’s (Oracle) brief: February 12, 2020
Reply (Google) brief: March 13, 2020
Oral Argument: Likely late March, possibly in April, otherwise delayed to October.
Ruling: If Oral argument is heard late march or in April, sometime this summer.
Depends on how you define summer I guess.
Interesting.
Poetic.
Google can’t win this fight (if they win) as a defendant, only as an aggressor.
Sure they can (and it's the only way they can), if they win at the Supreme Court, it will be as a Defendant-Appellant. And if, as is often the case, the final formalization of the victory comes on remand back to the trial court from the Supreme Court after the Supreme Court declares the controlling law, that victory will be as a simple Defendant.
(It’s been a beautiful saga. I hope they make a movie out of it.)
There's even a good chance that they will in my opinion, given the amount of lobbying dollars on the side of sanity in this case.
Still, I would rather not rely on congress doing anything sensible in a timely manner these days, especially when existing copyright law already sides with Google (IMO). It would also not be retroactive, so everyone under the sun can sue everyone under the sun over previous violations.
One area of copyrighted works I have seen people also question the legibility of being copyrightable is standard documents and law texts. They seems to me as very similar to an program API, if somewhat less strict when implemented. It would definitive lower the cost of interoperability if such works would be lifted outside of copyright.
On the risk side however, I am wondering if the Idea–expression distinction get pushed towards the idea side, then will companies just use that finding as an argument in favor of patenting API? 20 years is better than the practically infinity that is copyright, but I am not sure it will make the situation much better in the general case.
Perhaps this confusion stems from the fact that chip companies tend to license the ISA bundled with documentation and software tools, which are of course covered by copyright (see e.g. the MIPS Open license).
Some Key principles for open innovation
Creating value is not an end but a means for making our world better. You embrace openness when creating value for your customers. You use an OSI approved license when developing software. You use an Creative Commons License to share documentation that has value. You embrace openness as basic value for knowledge sharing and growth. Think of open science, open data, open access, open research. Knowledge and improvements should be beneficial and reachable for everyone. Your organization is inclusive.
Google will lose this. You don't explicitly copy code, take other people's engineers after exiting licensing talks with the company you took from, and have it not be about stealing someone else's intellectual efforts.
The courts have already explicitly denied Google's claim they did this for compatibility or interoperability. The grey area is how much damage Google has done to Oracle, and it's hard to put an explicit price on that. But given the popularity of Android and how Google's has massively benefited from the platform, in no small thanks to the development community around it, and given the absolutely morbid failure of its other community dev efforts it's not really hard to see that Android wouldn't be what it is today without Java; having a familiar platform for developers to code against is priceless (but not legally).
Google wanted all the benefits of using Java without actually paying for it.
Sun put a lot, and I mean a lot of money into Java. Java had well defined licensing terms for how to use their code. Oracle bought Java. Oracle has the rights to license and price their code however they want. Google does not. Google was in talks with Oracle to license Java but backed out when they didn't want to pay to use it. Instead Google took engineers from the company they copied code from, and re-licensed said code.
It's black and white but people's blind hate for Oracle leads them down an argument or view point the courts have already denied and are now ignoring.
Don't sacrifice your principles for some cheap hit against Oracle. If Google can just throw their man power around to ignore your license, your open source license will not matter. You will not get credit for the work you do. Google and others can just feel like they don't want to abide by your license, take your code, and re-license it however they want. It's already hard to enforce any type of open source licence but if Google comes out on top it really won't matter moving forward. That is what is at stake here.
"What we’ve actually been asked to do (by Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin]) is to investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome. We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need." - Email from Tim Lindholm, a Google Engineer
From the most recent hearing:
"Ultimately, we find that, even assuming the jury was unpersuaded that Google acted in bad faith, the highly commercial and non-transformative nature of the use strongly support the conclusion that the first factor weighs against a finding of fair use." - https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco20180327178
This is not how appeals works. The Supreme Court is obliged to cover just two questions presented in the petition for cert: (1) Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface; and (2) whether, as the jury found, the petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use.
The reason why it's hearing this case is because precedent on every circuit appeals court other than the federal circuit has answered "no" to the first question, and the precedent of fair use interpretation is such that CAFC overturning the jury verdict to rule not-fair-use is incredibly surprising.
> The courts have already explicitly denied Google's claim they did this for compatibility or interoperability.
That is factually incorrect. Whether or not Google did it for compatibility or interoperability is a factual determination. And facts are determined by jury, not by courts (and definitely not appeal courts). CAFC overturned the jury verdict, which found that Google's use was fair use. And Oracle does not contend that the jury was given bad instructions, which means that the appeals court can only consider if the jury's verdict was unreasonable.
> Google wanted all the benefits of using Java without actually paying for it.
I do not dispute this, and I don't think anyone disputes this. But the question is if it is legal for Google to do what it did... and the contention of quite literally everybody but Oracle is that it is.
> Google was in talks with Oracle to license Java but backed out when they didn't want to pay to use it.
Google was in talks with Sun, not Oracle. Sun didn't pursue Google because they couldn't find evidence of copyright violation. (As has been pointed out, many Sun engineers do suspect that Google didn't follow clean room implementation procedures strictly, but the amount of copied code that even Oracle could dredge up is 8 test files and a 10-line method called rangeCheck--not worth pursuing).
If you're making an emotional case based on the investment put into Java, you should be honest that Oracle bought Sun to acquire Java, in large part to sue Google for the use of Java in Android.
There are no good guys in this situation. The cynicism on both sides is astounding. One company outright stole work and negotiated in bad faith, and another tried to take advantage of that in the courts, which threatens to set a horrible precedent about APIs if they win.
Everything about this stinks.
> You don't explicitly copy code
Google didn't copy code. Even if you believe that APIs are copyrightable, Google's clean-room implementation hasn't been part of the case for years. It's just about the API now.
If you want to make an argument that APIs are copyrightable, fine, make that argument. Make the argument that Google is infringing on Oracles API. But if you're trying to accuse Google of copying code, you're wrong. You're conflating two ideas that are not related.
> It's black and white but people's blind hate for Oracle leads them down an argument or view point the courts have already denied and are now ignoring.
If this was actually as black and white as you say, the Supreme court wouldn't have agreed to hear it, they would have just allowed the lower court decision to stand. Unless you believe that Ruth Bader Ginsburg blindly hates Oracle for some reason?
Yes they did.
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
The appeal courts reversal of Alsups decision in 2014 was on the basis of copying the API. They wrote "that the overall structure of Oracle's API packages is creative, original, and resembles a taxonomy"[0].
You're conflating two separate issues, copying implementation code vs copying an API -- copying the implementation was resolved in 2012. Copying the API is still being litigated. If you have a docket or ruling or source that says otherwise, then of course feel free to list it.
Or if you want to make the argument that declarative headers for an API are technically code, then... OK, whatever, fine. But it's still wildly deceptive to conflate declarative code and implementation code without mentioning that the law has treated them separately for decades. You're making it sound to a normal reader like Google wholesale lifted implementation logic from Java, which is just not what happened.
You said code. Not implementation code.
I await the day the lawnmower defense becomes the new Chewbacca defense.
If something used to be in your Takeout data but is no longer there, that's most likely because Google no longer has that data about you.
None of the other Java vendors has ever had any problem with either Sun or Oracle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines
Or just like with Microsoft with J++, they can create their own .NET aka Android with either pure Kotlin/Native or Dart and see how successful it will turn out to be without piggybacking into the Java eco-system (Fuchsia).
POSIX is neither part of ISO C nor ISO C++.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-956/89487/20190...
That's a really effective framing for any company in a highly publicized legal dispute. If it happens to be true for Google in this particular dispute, that's nice but not necessary for the PR speak to be advantageous.
Google built one of the most valuable companies in the world on intellectual property. They want open innovation when it's a competitor being open, or when being open has strategic benefits. They don't give a damn otherwise.