Trump administration backs Oracle in Google fight
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Given the bipartisan history of the lawyers for the Copyright Office and the DOJ, one possibility is that they are basing the amicus on their interpretation of the Copyright Act and related legal precedents. My preference would be that public interface part of API's would be public domain. But that's a preference, not a legal opinion.
The problem with this case is that the legally correct thing is that Oracle wins. The most desirable practical outcome is that they lose.
Copyright protects creative works. It's not clear why an API wouldn't be a creative work. Oracle's lawyers argue that it is a creative work, because different people can come up with very different designs to solve the same problem, that API design is a skilled and creative process. They're right.
The tech industry has always been in an unstable situation with respect to this consensual interpretation that APIs are facts and not creative works. That's convenient for many people, but tricky to legally support. The correct solution to this problem is an exemption in copyright law for APIs. Given no such exemption exists, why should Oracle not win this case? The judges are meant to rule on law as it is, not what it should be.
So an option is to migrate the Android ecosystem onto Fuchsia to rid of the Oracle royalty fees and own the ecosystem without anyone else looking to sue you for the tech you're using if you created it.
And it's also amusing that the Dart-skeptics now see there is at least one legal reason to justify Google's continued development of Flutter.
Tons of smart TVs are shipped with Tizen. Last smart watch that uses Tizen is shipped in 2018.
2020
But this lawsuit isn't about the JVM. Its about the java sdk.
Can they, after an Oracle victory?
The better option is the one Google already did ages ago, switch to OpenJDK: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switch...
Which is GPLv2 w/ classpath exception straight from Oracle. No work for app devs and no work for OEMs.
On the one hand, Google is huge and needs competition. On the other hand: not this way. Antitrust and monopoly laws exist for a reason, but if you look at telephones in the 80's and microsoft & intel in the 90's, better lawyers get you around that.
We need trustbusters with teeth. Especially for tech. I wish the EFF was 100x larger.
And of course there’s the tiny detail that Trump had to conquer the corruption of the Republican Party first to even broach the Democrats. See all the #nevertrump senators that prioritized #resisting Trump in spite of their constituents and his support amongst the party.
What had more effect on IE being toppled by Chrome, the government or the most popular website advertising it on their front page and bundling it with third party downloads?
It was the control over individual customers that mattered not any particular market. The ‘94 act would have been quite prescient to be defending open internet access when first drafted in the early eighties.
Even before the government sanctioned their monopoly, AT&T was becoming a monopoly using strategies that the feds were arguing were anti-competitive and in violation of antitrust laws. You could argue the government first acquiesced their monopoly with the Kingsbury Commitment in 1913.
In the '20s and '30s, the government allowed them to resume buying up local carriers and established the FCC to set rates, but there was still tension and antitrust suits up until the '50s.
Like any relation, the government's and Ma Bell's was always "complicated".
they were pursuing a number of antitrust cases against them. Needless to say, AT&T's relationship with the federal government and regulators wasn't static over the next 60-70 years. Sometimes it was at odds, sometimes it was symbiotic.
The story could largely be reduced to: Giant Multinational sues Giant Multinational; both gain support of other Giant Multinationals while World's Most Powerful Government sides with plaintiff Giant Multinational.
The EFF needs to 100,000x larger to influence this level of game.
This is just another iteration of BSD vs UNIX.
This is so silly. It's like every toy compiler has to pay a license because it looks like "C", even if you make money and other software with it.
As long as they did not "literally" steal the code, I don't see any reason to bother with Oracle's defense.
The same thing happens with MPAA and others, where the actual creators hardly get much but "abstract" corporates get a lot. How long should the copyright law hold? No more than the lifetime of the author. They have made a corporation an abstract person, giving it all sorts of inalienable rights. Lulz ... if that's how you want to go, every time someone in a company commits suicide, the entire corporation needs to be charged with murder and the entire team needs to be thrown in jail and be charged for murder. Every privacy violation would be espionage charges .....
So a corporation can screw many people with legalese, pretending to be everyone's friend and no one gets blamed. It sounds like a convenient loophole to me.
What the fuck is the CEO for then? Its comical because most people treat corporations as the CEO. A vs B is very different from naming names.
They just don't care about hiding shit anymore because nobody understands/does anything significant to revolt.
>> At an earlier stage in litigation, the Obama administration took a similar position, urging the Supreme Court not to accept Google's appeal.
Did Ellison do a fundraiser for Obama as well?
The situation now is that Google won at court again. The jury found the API reimplementation was fair use. And the Federal Circuit overturned the trial court again, saying (I'm not making this up, though obviously I'm paraphrasing) "The jury trial we demanded before was invalid because this infringement cannot be fair use as a matter of law, we just forgot to tell you that earlier."
That is, the Federal Circuit is behaving badly here, effectively shopping around for a basis to force a trial court to find for Oracle. The time for principled legal arguments was literally six years ago, this is just partisan hackery.
So obviously Google is appealing to SCOTUS (they took the case this time, for obvious reasons), and the DoJ is jumping in to pick a side in the substance of the actual case, something they really didn't do earlier by requesting that the appelate victory stand.
Except you didn't actually demonstrate that, since they involve different appeals which did not present the exact same questions to the Court.
To demonstrate what you are trying to demonstrate you need to look at the two petitions and the briefs submitted by the two administrations, and see how much the two administrations agreed on whatever questions, if any, were common to the two petitions.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/12/21135722/larry-ellison-...
Edit: Beat me to it!
Am I understanding this correctly that this has been a bipartisan position?
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/12/tru...
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/18/bar...
Edit: some suggest Ellison doesn’t play golf, that said Obama visited his courses regularly and I’m sure there were plenty of occasions where they interacted closely before or after the round.
Clearly running a political fundraiser sits at a different level of influence peddling. We literally have laws to regulate that and disclose the activity (where disclosure of routine meetings are, in fact, protected by law as executive privilege)!
It's different. It's not the same. Saying "Trump did a favor because Ellison drove $2M to his campaing" has a stronger basis than "Obama did a favor because Ellison let him win at golf."
And I'll just say it: at the end of the day, people who believe "everyone is just as bad" are the ones who are likely to excuse the worst corruption in government via "well, at least it's my candidate doing the cheating".
In my opinion, a possible connection between fundraisers/golfing and political outcomes doesn't necessarily rise to "conspiracy theorist".
Do elites ever give money to deregulate?
"conspiracy theorist" has, to a large extent, become a phrase used to describe a certain class of fairly nutty folks these days, rightly or wrongly. I was noting that it's possible that someone pointing out a possible political outcome based on money transfer/golf games can do so without being a member of that group, as its effectively defined today.
I'm starting to think we should let/get someone to found Sirius Cybernetics and let them snap up the whole FAANG group, Oracle, etc just so they can be "first up against the wall when the revolution comes".
The Trump Administration’s environmental deregulation drive is no doubt lobbied for, backed by, and funded in part by the Fossil Fuel industry.
Enron lobbied for deregulation
Isn't this orthogonal? Golf has absolutely nothing to do with athleticism.
Tiger Woods on his old workout routine: “Well, I used to get up in the morning, run four miles,” Woods said. “Then I’d go to the gym, do my lift. Then I’d hit balls for two to three hours. I’d go play, come back, work on my short game. I’d go run another four more miles, and then if anyone wanted to play basketball or tennis, I would go play basketball or tennis. That was a daily routine.
https://www.mensjournal.com/health-fitness/tiger-woods-revea...
My job involves sitting at a desk and writing code; my athleticism has nothing to do with it. It's the same with Tiger Woods.
I don't see the difference. Golf is not an athletic sport, and it's plainly absurd to try to argue otherwise. There's nothing "athletic" about walking around slowly and hitting a ball with a stick; even bowling is more athletic than that. It might take some skill, sure, just like playing a musical instrument like a piano takes a lot of skill, but there's nothing athletic about playing a piano either.
Golf has more than a little to do with athleticism, though, like many, especially individual, sports, it's possible for amateurs to play at (often, an approximation of) it without much athleticism.
That in turn has colored my opinion of any antitrust action this administration takes, and I wouldn't be shocked if this action had some sort of corrupted subtext as well. I wouldn't trust this administration to perform antitrust actions for the sake of antitrust actions, but rather for some sort of ancillary benefits.
CNN being critical of the administration is immaterial (practically all large media outlets are). The concern from the administration seems justified rather than malicious in this case.
As well, if they cared about freedom of the press in the face of media consolidation, Sinclair wouldn't have been able to buy up so many local news outlets. But Sinclair runs stories that praise the administration, and Sinclair has impunity when it comes to acquisitions.
The Obama administration took the position that SCOTUS should not take up the case, because Google was likely to win on the argument that it had a fair use claim (making the copyright issue moot), and if it didn't, then you could consider both the "is it copyright?" and "is it fair use?" concerns simultaneously.
But then when the same government interferes and is on the "wrong" side of popular geek opinion there is an uproar.
TL;DR: Government should regulate industries, but it should do it for the greater good or people will complain.
For example was different phone manufacturers using different cables really enough of a negative externality for the EU to step in?
That only works if you have choices that aren't just the same megacorporation with different names. In reality, most people have less voting power in their wallets than it appears.
However, when you are talking about the same government, when they agree with you, will upvote you?
This, right here, is a broken system. People should only be able to upvote or downvote another person, but not both, whenever they are talking about the same government!
The same branch of the same country, but with changes in who occupies it they can be vastly different.
I greatly dislike the "both sides are the same" narrative, but there were some strong elements of consistency regardless of occupant.
The current administration is an entirely new beast that reflects the whims of a single individual. We are in uncharted waters now.
The small-government counterargument has always been "You are not going to like this new power when it's inevitably in the hands of the wrong person". That has always been ignored--the Whig theory of history ruled as enlightened new theories for social management demanded more and more centralized authority for the greater good.
Now that the chickens are home to roost and someone truly offensive to the left has been elected, they are doing the world's biggest surprised Pikachu face. But the capacity for human self-deception is infinite, as for example the very same people panicking about imminent fascist takeover are simultaneously panicking that anyone other than the government has guns. So I don't believe that any event can shock the hubris out of smart people and their tidy moral rubrics.
But at the same time, it’s just silly to think that a reason to own guns is in case the government wants to impose martial law. We are talking about the government with the largest military in the world - with tanks, jet fighters, bombs etc. The 2nd amendment is not going to protect you from a hypothetical fascist government.
Clearly not realistic.
Isn’t that the definition of a civil war?
But if you are convinced that the military would turn on its own people, doesn’t that still make the whole “we need guns to protect ourself from a potential fascist government and we are going to run around in the woods and prepare” silly?
I
The idea that the military would stay unified and be on one ‘side’ of a civil war does not.
In any case it is obvious from the Middle East that people with guns can in fact stand up to the US military quite successfully.
I don't take any pleasure in saying any of this; I'm not interested in besmirching the values of others that I do not share. But what is happening is crazy. The President of the United States is advocating that anybody who does not blindly support him is the enemy; and that those enemies need to be "dealt with".
This is way beyond "America, love it or leave it".
But it's not just about resisting hypothetical martial law in the future. It's about having a free culture now. Just like encryption, it is the difference between power deriving from consent the governed and an open-air prison and also has legitimate use for personal protection. The mere fact they don't want you to have it is reason enough to keep it by tooth and nail.
Are you aware of the reports that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were multi-trillion dollar failures?
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
Well, you've just proven yourself wrong. I am panicking over a fascist takeover and I don't think that only the government should have guns. I also know that I'm not alone in this sentiment.
> So I don't believe that any event can shock the hubris out of smart people and their tidy moral rubrics
Does this include yourself?
Some of the more forward looking liberals warned against executive orders when Obama was in the White House. They said that be careful about the precedent it was setting. Now those same people are bemoaning the current administration.
It’s always dangerous to give government more power.
And to avoid getting too political I'll avoid questioning the loyalties and competence of this individual. I don't care if it was Obama or Bernie or Daffy Duck, this is a dangerous situation and it's compounded by the acceptance/acquiescence of a startlingly large portion of the population.
Compare that with a previous generation where the GOP leadership went to the President and told him they could not support him because he had gone too far, and Nixon therefore resigned.
Justices Roberts was a figurehead at the trial and his actions were supportive of the outcome.
This is not "normal"; this is not the democracy I learned back in the day.
> (Do not...) Downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it. Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.
Downvotes should not be used as an "I disagree" button, that is what the reply button is for.
Industries, pretty much without exception, don't want that.
For instance, they must regulate communications because the airways are limited and a free for all would render communications useless.
The government getting involved in basic research is also necessary sometimes.
Trump doing this for Larry Ellison doing a fund raiser for him, is simplistic mid-manager level thinking!
I haven’t been following the case, but please let me know why you have reached the conclusions that you have.
I know Trump is a reality show host, but he seems to focus on the culture war and Twitter, not high level corporate battles the masses rarely pay attention to.
Does that make my observation worth thinking about?
I think the case is actually very interesting, and not clear cut. It's going to be interesting to find out what the law means as applied to software in this way. I think it's fascinating. A real test between the 'old power' of the law, and the 'new power' of software, I think seeing this play out and considering the implications is incredibly interesting, and as tech people, we're the best placed to enjoy how interesting is.
All the shrill rhetoric of both sides and press aside, I think it's a very significant case even if they weren't massive companies (...tho maybe it couldn't have come this far if the companies hadn't been able to afford it).
In a similar, but less glamorous vein was the LinkedIn vs somebody data scraping case, the outcome of which was very interesting and meaningful. Anyway, I hope people can appreciate the significance of the case without dismissing or simplifying it in this shrill, childish way, and can think about the software implications, which are probably going to be very interesting.
I mean when it's all done we'll probably get to know where we all stand more clearly with software, licensing, re-use and so on, and probably new opportunities we don't see clearly now will become possible because of how the law is figured regarding this. I think that's fascinating, and has nothing to do with idiocy or politics.
And now they're shocked, shocked, that getting political with your monopolistic companies carries some political risk.
The solution is easy enough -- don't talk about politics at work -- and in particular not if you're the CEO.
Sure, that'd be great, but it's never happened before and will likely not happen for the foreseeable future.
It'd be nice if it wasn't like this, but it just isn't; this country is too corrupt for huge players to just ignore politics, when their competitors don't.
What are you referring to here? The fact that executives had and expressed political opinions, or are you alleging that they put their fingers on the scales?
Both parties don't seem to understand the issue, for what it's worth.
2) Oracle’s Chief Sleazeball recently hosted a fundraiser for Trump.
It's turtles all the way down.
[1] https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3653.htm
You guys need to find an example where one company offered licensing and the other simply refused to negotiate.
> You guys need to find an example where one company offered licensing and the other simply refused to negotiate.
Part of the trouble with this, I think, is that prior to this case, nobody thought there was a need to license this, since it wasn't covered by copyright by any sane reading of the law. (And I still think it isn't, and the appellate court erred in overturning the district court.)
The best counter-example I can think of is "Microsoft NWLink", which was a Netware 3-compatible file server offered with Windows NT. How long and under which legal threats is unknown to me.
I prefer the way our industry evolved without interfaces being copyrightable.
This might limit someone else's to reimplement the language's own specs? Something like LLVM will be forbidden in this case?
And Web is a complete mess, if CSS also an API? Are different JS engines will be allowed to be implemented later?
Also SMB? Although I think that's done at the protocol layer and not the C API layer (?)
What? Wasn't it about APIs not code?
It’s unclear to me if the administration only sides with Oracle on this count, or also on reimplementation of APIs, which would have sweeping impacts.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
but to me, it sounds like a fascinating and hilarious dystopian visions... there'd be entire legal teams dedicated to find, and claim and defend the corporate specific ways to implement.. a range check (NO! Don't put a space there! Oh dear!). Or, if a number is even. And an eternal cultural feud between the "is-even"-clan and the "is-odd"-triad.
Once we include mercenaries hired to steal certificates about a specific is-odd implementation, we're in a really weird kind of cyberpunk or shadow run.
Also, don't count the number of paragraphs in this comment and think about them. Don't! Or else!
Reality: Yes, Oracle is openly bribing the president to get the administration to push their agenda.
What's interesting about this is Google made two huge mistakes here:
1. According to Google, Sun was fine with their use of Java. If so, why not just put it in writing and get a license? This might've only cost $10 million at the time. Maybe not even that. Even if it was $100 million, it sure looks cheap now;
Remember, Microsoft originally paid for a Java license for IE [2]. And one issue with the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit was that Sun argued forking Java was a breach of contract. Surely this establishes that even if Sun were fine with Android they could try and enforce their IP rights through litigation. So why not enshrine this in a license?
2. Google declined to bid on Sun. I remember when this went down and it seemed risky to let Oracle control Java given how invested Google was in Java at that point. And it should've been clear that Oracle's interest was to leverage Sun's IP to get a slice of Android. Hubris is the only thing I can think of that justified letting this happen.
[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-l...
[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/
This hatred doesn't come out of nowhere. Google's leaders could have chosen to make the company neutral and tolerant. Instead, they bred a culture of political zealotry from top to bottom. The partisan hatred that the company engendered then leaked into the outside world. The inevitable result? Half of the United States power structure sees Google as an irredeemably biased political project masquerading as a tech company. Is it? Maybe not. But whether this judgement is true doesn't matter --- what matter is the perception that the company allowed its internal activists to create. It was an unforced error, and it's one that I think will become an infamous cautionary tale in the coming decades.
Lesson to corporate leaders: don't encourage politics at work; don't encourage a culture of demonizing a political faction in your home country that wins about half the time; and especially don't hold a company-wide all hands election after this faction wins the election and lament that "we lost".
Honestly the more I am on HN the more I see that hating a company is pretty dumb, I work in a big org that big org has thousands of people making thousands of decisions, nobody has good information and half the people making decisions are incompetent or selfish, or both.
But Google, there are some things I like about it, they have some cool tech and based on what I've seen and heard the Google founders really were interested in making the world a better place to some extent. From a professional perspective I don't like them more lately because it seems like they've turned into Ballmer era M$ than a company interested in good tech and what not.
Now I don't agree with a lot of the vocal minority at Google that wants to turn everything into some sort of political issue and seems to have a blinding hatred of the very word Trump, but I also recognize that's probably a small vocal minority at the company, most of the people at Google are probably just regular people like me, who I might disagree with on politics but are still people, and most of them don't think that everyone who voted for Trump is a closet Neo Nazi that has Swastika hanging in their bedroom, and likewise I assume most of the people at Google aren't some sort of crazed SJW that believes that white people should be enslaved and men should all be denied the right to vote as some sort of mass justice.
My point which I admit wandered is that I think this typecasing of everyone who is X all hate Y or all worship Z is a problem that exceeds anything Trump, the SJWs, the Left the Oompa Loompas or anyone else in politics is doing. I am Republican I have strong opinions but I also recognize there are complicated issues to deal with and anyone who thinks they have the universal answer is either stupid, evil or both.
I admit I could be wrong though it could be that the entire world really is full mostly of people that want everyone who disagrees with them dead in a ditch and believes that they and their opinions are the one true solution to all problems, and are all justice looking to establish their own little totalitarian utopia, but maybe just maybe the majority of people in the world are mostly decent, reasonable, and are looking to do what they can to make the world a slightly better place.
Well I am a Democrat and I can at least confirm that it's not the entire world that feels this way.
Despite our political differences I think you and I probably have more in common than we might think. Maybe not politically but in our belief that we, and "our side", don't have all the answers, that issues can be very complicated and that solving them involves sometimes finding common ground.
I too would like to believe that the majority of people feel the same and that it's the vocal minorities you mentioned that create 99% of the drama we see playing out these days. I get discouraged sometimes but then here comes a comment like yours that brings back a little hope that I am correct in thinking that most people are normal, ordinary people that are just as perplexed as I am over all the vitriolic back and forth they see in the news and social media.
I didn't see it on HN yet (maybe it's here and got flagged), but this story went around on Reddit yesterday:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f6pyiu/cloud_v...
Google are adjusting one of their AI APIs to refuse to label men and women in images, because it's "biased".
Clearly that's a minority viewpoint, but it's being implemented formally in their products. It's safe to assume the entire company is working towards the destruction not just of the Republican party but its entire worldview.
I agree, but there's the additional angle that Trump and Fox have been accusing Google of putting a liberal bias into their search results.
THAT, I believe, is the background that can make so many of his followers "see red" at the idea of Google winning something.
That's why the idea of regulating social media and search products as public utilities arose, and why Facebook is currently walking on eggshells to appear neutral and apolitical.
If you're like most people on HN you probably don't consume much conservative media. Or at least way less than the President does. If you're curious as to what sort of thing his circle are reading, go look here:
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/
Note the nature of the stories. Many of them are about tech firms apparently discriminating against or attacking conservatives and conservative politicians. Also note that people don't really distinguish between tech firms. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon. They're all seen as basically the same group of people and in fairness, they kinda are ... Facebook was built in the early days by poaching lots of Googlers.
By the way, anyone who reads across the spectrum will quickly notice that Google News seems to have silently blacklisted Breitbart. It's indexed, but never ranks and doesn't auto-complete. Instead the ranking reliably pushes liberal outlets to the fore. I read across the spectrum - NYT, Guardian, Telegraph, Breitbart, Washington Post, whatever gets linked here. Google News very obviously wants me to read certain worldviews much more than others. The UI doesn't make that obvious though.
Google's institutional hatred of the Republican party is by now old news. I'll be really upset if this leads to a win for Oracle. APIs should not be copyrightable but it's not obvious why not to people who aren't developers.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623
If this is a part of "Making America Great Again (TM)" campaign, they may be shooting them in the proverbial foot with a BFG9000 breaking down all interoperability in their own tech sector.
TLDR: Oracle has a lobbyist (who was on Trump's transition team) that has gotten the ear of the Whitehouse and been pushing against Amazon and Google.
Worked for a pardon, Paul Pogue's family just wrote a $200k check and voila, he's pardoned.
The office of president has never been more transparently for sale (ahem, "open for business") and there's absolutely no chance the Senate will perform any accountability here. He could literally murder someone on 7th avenue and there would be 51 votes against conviction.
Sad that it's come to this, but if it's $200k vs an industry-destroying precedent getting set, well... google should suck it up and write the check.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google...
Host fundraiser inviting a couple of your friends to all donate huge amounts to the president: What on earth is the problem? That's completely fair game and I don't see any issues at all.
It seems the US Democracy is morally bankrupt at this point.
Is this the same Trump that doesn't need anyone's money and isn't beholden to anyone? (Sorry for using Breitbart as a reference).
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-d...
It seems the Trump administration position is not really all that different than the previous administrations.
When the Supreme Court did not step in and overturn CAFC's overturning of the first trial, there was a second trial to determine whether Google's use was fair use. The first trial had not reached that issue.
The trial court said it was, CAFC overturned that. This present appeal is on that issue.
It'll mean Google will pay a huge penalty for very willfully stealing Java when they knew they were supposed to license it, and other companies will be a little more explicit about getting licenses squared away. Reliance on open source APIs and platforms will probably go up, and license compliance with terms of GPL and the like will be taken more seriously.
Any precedent that establishes clean-room API reimplementations are subject to copyright infringement is bad for everyone.
You're willing to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
But patents are already just as powerful, actually much more so. They cause a lot of problems but haven't caused the tech industry to collapse in a MAD Mexican standoff of lawsuits.