Google and Oracle's decade-long copyright battle reaches Supreme Court

Imagine you're a company using some Oracle database, and you want to reimplement some component of that system in order to migrate and escape their vendor lock-in... You can't, not without taking a huge legal risk.

In the short term, it's a victory for huge litigious corporations like Oracle. The good thing, I hope, is that in the long term, this will make people distrust closed source software even more. What Oracle wants, and has always wanted, is to bind you in the worst possible form of vendor lock-in. Open source and open standards are the answer. Refuse anything else.

I am very worried about this case.

I was wondering where would the Oracle win hurt most, and I think there is worse than WINE.

The Unix syscalls would have been Bell Labs’ copyright. That copyright was sold to Novell, which was sold to… Micro Focus International plc?

So this British consulting company that is, according to its website, “powering digital transformation”, could transform the digital world by suing BSD, Linux, Apple and Microsoft for tremendous sums of money and forbid them from using the famous syscalls.

I guess a given set of CLI programs may also be seen as an application programming interface, which makes all of GNU liable too.

Is that correct?

Oracle's lawsuit is so bad-faith it is laughable.

From the previous thread I referred to, a commenter cited an excerpt from a circuit court opinion about alternative naming :

[...] Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked." Copyrightability Decision, 872 F. Supp. 2d at 976. [...]

[1] don't know where the canonical source is so I provide a Google search link: https://www.google.com/search?q=Using+the+district+court%27s...

That also isn't how copyright works.

You're essentially asserting copyright over the semantics of an API.

The semantics of an API may (although I would argue otherwise) be protected, but if they are it would have to be either as a design patent, or as trade dress, not as copyright.

That said, even if the un-synonymized API is protected by copyright (and I would generally argue otherwise), reimplementing it must be seen as fair use, all the more so an API with renamed functions.

For a more recent example: Amazon's DocumentDB reimplements the MongoDB API. This should be allowed, even though we could wish Amazon had acted otherwise.

Here is the crux of the matter: unless there is some sort of no-man's-land between the various intellectual property regimes for software, no interoperability will be allowed except that which a vendor explicitly opts into. If copyrights, trademarks, and patents overlap sufficiently, even clean-room reimplementations will be forbidden.

We can argue about which aspects of software should be protected, for how long, and by what means, but at the end of the day there must be an unprotectable area of some kind, or we're all going to be doomed to either working entirely within vendors' vertically integrated stacks, or else implementing NSidedWheelAPIFactoryFactory() all the way down to bare metal for the foreseeable future.

In general that is largely true. In the particular type of copyright being argued in this particular case Oracle has stated that changing the name or spelling of the methods would have been enough to avoid being in violation:

Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked."

That's how stupid car analogies are...

Oracle is trying to argue that just because you intentionally left a bunch of implementation detail out because it isn't relevant toward transforming something like the Java API's to a new context, it should still count as copyright infringement because they Still yoinked everything they did take... Which seems circular to me.

Google's point is "no shit, Sherlock, it wouldn't be Java otherwise." Oracle is couching this issue from the perspective that Google should have invented a completely New language and runtime, absorbing the same costs of them doing so. Google argues, on the other hand, that what they made, in order to confer to the syntactic structure of the programming language known as Java, dictates the duplication of the organization of the fundamental functions, packages, and namespaces, and that furthermore, Oracle has no standing to call them on it, because those APIs are a necessary prerequite to drive the operation of the JVM, and are by definition the only way to do it, so that API constitutes a method of operation.

Well, they aren't part of the implementation, since they just describe the interface. Google's theory is that interfaces, being needed for interoperability, are not protected by copyright. Google's alternate theory is that, even if they are protected by copyright, using them is fair use.

All they did was port the language to a new compile target. When you port a language over you also port the standard library or at least the parts that you need. This is standard across the industry. Every language implementation does it. What Oracle is trying to say is that you need a license to do it and that is a dramatic change in the industry practice right now.

It's also short sighted. If Oracle wins then you'll need a license to implement java the language (as opposed to the JVM) anywhere. Short term Oracle get's a pile of money. Long term everyone stops using Java. But then again if you are Oracle, with it's current values, Java's only real value is short term money gains. It's hard to make money on a programming language the way Oracle prefers to operate so this may be the best they can do.

Oracle claim is that google copies of header files requires copy right permission, with google saying that header files are either not protected by copyright or that using them is fair use.

FSF claim in regard to dynamically linked libraries is that using them in a work creates a derivative work. For C code, software without its dynamically linked libraries won't even load past the linker, and in their view, a judge/jury will see the program as a single work rather than two independent works.

This court case will not define what is a derivative work or when two combined works should be seen as independent of each other. It may explore the limits of what is copyrightable and what is fair use, which is interesting in terms of API's and compatibility but less so for defining the limits of the GPL as an copyright license.

I don't know if it's different enough, but it's not the exact same issue.

>It says what Google has done is like taking key parts of those books — chapter titles, character names, the first sentence of each paragraph — writing a new book, and selling it.

If you're reimplementing APIs as Google has done then at some point you _need_ to copy the structure of the existing API, the method signatures, the names of the methods, the descriptions of what they do, etc, and while you may be able to dig out a thesaurus to claim enough original creative work at some point it's all for moot because there's only so much you can do before you'll start infringing upon Oracles creative expression of their API which severely limits what you are able to do with it.

If Oracle wins this case it will have huge implications for any reverse engineered work like Wine or graphics drivers where such projects will cease to exist, because it won't actually matter if it's 100% your own implementation as any interface to existing APIs or hardware _will_ infringe upon other companies copyright.

As far as Youtube Content ID goes it doesn't actually matter if it's 3 seconds or 3 minutes of copyrighted work, if it's matched then Youtube will let those companies claim revenue from your video which may be an hour long. The alternative here is the legal system and courts which may absolutely agree that 3 seconds of use in an hour long video is fair use, but you're still going to end up in court to defend that usage. It's unlikely that Oracle has enough sway to force Github to implement a similar content matching system but if they did it doesn't really matter what threshold the courts set for fair use for reimplementing APIs just like it doesn't matter for Youtube, best make sure all your repos don't use something like XMLHttpRequest() or your repo may disappear, and of course if Oracle doesn't have the sway to force Github into implementing such a system you're still going to have to go check through all your your repos because if they feel you've infringed upon their creative work they'll be able to issue takedown requests and your only recourse will be through the courts.

You surely meant 9, not 10k, lines of code for rangeCheck(), didn't you?

Copyright is necessary but the laws today are draconian and far too extensive. For works since 1978, copyright lasts for the entire length of the author's life, plus an additional 70 years. The "Mickey Mouse" protection act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act) increased this even further for some works.

There's a need to allow artists and writers to make money from their creations and not just get their work instantly reproduced by pirates. At the same time, it's in the public interest for their work to become widely available after a short period of protection. I don't know exactly how long that period should be to maximally benefit society, but 15 years sounds a lot more reasonable than life+75 years.

It's absolutely absurd that Arthur Conan Doyle's distant ancestors can today be suing people for creating derivatives of Sherlock Holmes, a literary character conceived in 1887. Sherlock Holmes belongs to the public, not some greedy relatives trying to leech a living from him.

I don’t know, you see, sometimes I have some doubts about my uncertainty. But should I trust my memory about what might have happened in my head in the past?

>I think about art, and artists as a musician myself. One advantage of copyright is that it does, indeed, give artists recourse when people use their works without compensation.

Practices of art and culture, including music, long predate any copyright law. Or even money, most likely (an archeologist will tell you that with more confidence about the veracity of such a claim).

According monopoly of exploitation rarely turn into proliferation of diversity, most of the time it will fall into feedback loop where a few entities will "take it all" and widely spread the "best fit for all".

>The photographer whose picture was copied and pasted onto an advertisement.

There are different topic here. In the French droit d’auteur, you have a separation of "moral rights" – including who is granted to publish your work in which context – and "patrimonial rights" – how monetization of the work is managed.

The only reason we know of that particular case is because they happened to charge the original creator.

The dynamic is ripe for corruption. If Getty failed to report all the works they were collecting for, and instead siphoned money off on the side, how would anyone know?

You've seen this on a small scale in areas like clipart. It's not a very lucrative business though and it does mean you only have creators with either "passion" or money.

0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.

2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others.

3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

The only thing taking away these freedoms is copyright and public domain software gives you all these freedoms. The only caveat is with 1) in that one could use digital restrictions management to make this harder. However, there is a difference between "circumventing DRM is difficult" and "circumventing DRM is illegal".

Actually, just one, the desktop.

In virtually every other market, Linux is either dominating or has a firm share.

Your lack of imagination is disappointing, and also hints at a failure of empathy.

What it would mean is the games that we all played as kids but are long since out of store shelves would now be free to distribute.

You could try and argue fair use, and it would be distinct from the case at hand so you might win, but fair use is always a fact intensive analysis and it's certainly not obvious that you would win.

Your toy language cannot read the API information into memory to compile with it, because that would be copying it.

Kind of like how Java is now open source and Google can use it but Oracle's lawsuit is about what Google did before it was open source.

But I'd guess there's some kind of statute of limitations or similar for infringement that old.

"the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole."

Trying to achieve full compatibility would seem to require copying more of the original API, not less.

With a single legislative act, we need not worry about this or anything else, modulo constitutional issues which can also be fixed via amendments.

No, it is not obvious that API is a "functional thing" covered by existing law by the mere fact that SCOTUS has taken it on and it was a case to begin with.

I'm not sure why a trivial act of congress isn't the first thing we jump to rather than risk ruin. All the act needs to do is clarify what copyright means.

A copyright act for the digital millenium, if you will -- you can call it DMCA 2.0 :)

Jobs died thinking that Android (and particularly Eric Schmidt's part in sitting on the Apple board while Android was being cooked up at Google) was a personal affront to his magnum opus of iPhone, and the rumor is that Ellison agreed to hurt Android any way he could more or less without regard for the costs.

If techies want APIs to be uncopyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and seek a carve-out exception in statute. Asking the courts to affirm what they assume to be the case undermines all of copyright. I know some Hackernews are okay with that, but I have friends and family who are artists and musicians, and they want to be able to put food on the table doing what they love.

To me, the current copyright regime is what's "absurd" and "plainly ridiculous"; I am merely drawing conclusions based on what exists.