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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

They're smart people and these are not hard concepts.

It still requires domain-specific knowledge and there are vested interests from both sides. I'm afraid because the world has little to gain and much to lose from the outcome of this case.

These people are experts at getting up to speed on diverse topics and have amazing teams clerking for them and a huge bench of experts to call on. I'm sure the domain-specific knowledge will be fine although the vested interests will clearly be a problem.

I have never been involved in a US Supreme Court case but back in 1999 or so I was asked to prep a barrister in the UK on the guts of TCP/IP. I literally jumped in a black cab at short notice with 6 or 7 volumes of W. Richard Stevens and spent an afternoon showing him and a few others from his chambers packet dumps and TCP state diagrams and drawing some diagrams of my own showing what a webserver, browser does, how caching works, etc. The next day using my information synthesized with some really archaic law about what is and isn't a document he issued his opinion about where particular actions occur (and therefore what legal jurisdictions apply) when someone does something on a website. It was extremely thoughtful and nuanced and literally a day earlier he didn't even know what a webpage was.

This doesn't really surprise me. I think it's a bit of an ego-condition that the tech industry believes because only tech people understand technology that only tech people should be allowed to set policy on it.

In reality, technology (and technology companies) mirror their predecessors in other industries. And often abuses of copyright or antitrust by tech companies really isn't much different than the actions of companies decades ago, just obscured by a layer of technology magic.

Of course they are smart people but they are also quite backwards when it comes to technology and I doubt they would take the time to learn the real differences between APIs, code, algorithm implementations vs theory, etc. They will probably try to use a car analogy in their final arguments and rulings.

as long as its not a horse..

Especially since there's no actual "tech" in the discussion here. Since Oracle's claim is that Google's use of the Java APIs wasn't to provide compatibility to existing software written in Java but to have a familiar language for Java developers it becomes a novel but normal copyright case.

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