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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> Google didn't copy any of Oracle/Sun's Java source code base into Android Java. Oracle lawyers acknowledge this.

That's not true, there were nine lines of source code (range check) copied verbatim, not counting the 11,500 lines of API declarations.

But the API declarations are source code, too.

> If Oracle ultimately wins, it seems like millions of programmers will have to reach for a thesaurus to find synonyms to name functions.

That really depends on how Oracle wins, and specifically what rule is articulated.

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IIRC Judge Alsup (the original judge, and the only person in this whole shit-show who knows anything about programming) ruled against this, as he determined that there were only so many ways to write a range-checking function. He said it was entirely plausible that the Google developer would have come up with the exact same function independently.

Yeah, he did. Not common, but hey, Haskell is his middle name. (Really, it is.)

> IIRC Judge Alsup (the original judge, and the only person in this whole shit-show who knows anything about programming) ruled against this, as he determined that there were only so many ways to write a range-checking function.

No, it was found to be a copyright infringement in the first trial; it's one point on which Oracle sought to have the district court upheld and Google sought to have it overturned in the original set of appeals and cross-appeals. (While on many other issues they split the other way.)

> No, it was found to be a copyright infringement in the first trial

I believe GP is correct. The jury found it to be infringement, but then Alsup ruled it wasn't copyrightable in the first place, so the jury's finding was irrelevant.

edit: oops, sorry, didn't realize the rangeCheck scope of this subthread

> The jury found it to be infringement, but then Alsup ruled it wasn't copyrightable in the first place, so the jury's finding was irrelevant.

No, the final judgement in the first trial by Alsup found the APIs weren't copyrightable, but that the literal copying of rangeCheck and some other compiled files was infringement. (For which no damages were awarded, by stipulation of the parties, I think because everyone was planning to appeal everything and didn't really want to wait for damage calculations to get that ball rolling.)

It's a short ruling: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1211.pdf

Folks realize some of the people at Google were actually previously on the Java team.

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