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Comment by bosswipe | Hacker News Reader

It's shocking to me that two jury trials spent months considering arguments from lawyers and experts from all sides and carefully came to a decision only to have the appeals court throw that all away and impose the opposite ruling, twice. What was the point of the trials? I don't know why the Federal Circuit court is so biased towards maximalist interpretations of IP law but I really hope the Supreme Court slaps it down hard. Again.

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The Federal Courts Improvement Act of 1982 did that. District judges are about geographical boundaries and need to make decisions about every kind of subject area, but Federal Circuit court judges operate based on subject area. That way a patent lawyer that want to be a judge handling patents can go to the Federal Circuit court, and unsurprising a very large portion of Federal Circuit court judges are past lawyers working in industry with companies within the same subject area. As a result it is not very strange that a court packed with past IP lawyers are biased towards maximalist interpretations of IP law.

What happens if I expose a Java FFI ( i.e. thin wrapper around Java stdlib) in my toy language. Do I break their license?

It would be a derivative work of the api, so per Oracle's argument you would be violating their copyright absent a license. (You could use the gpl OpenJDK license if your code was GPLed, I think).

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.

yep although the openjdk stdlib is licensed with a linking exception, so you can relicense it entirely when linking against it.

You'll need a license for that if APIs are now copyrightable.

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

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