Hacker News Reader

Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the most important legal decisions in the history of software. The US Supreme Court has basically just saved the whole software industry (and FOSS projects) from being wrecked by patent trolls.

View on HN

s/patent trolls/copyright trolls/

This case involved copyright, not patents. Copyrights are separate from patents.

I agree with the parent. Patent trolls aren't tied to patents because of some love for patents specifically, but because the legal structure allows for the most misuse. They would gladly add another tool to their belt given the chance, as we saw from this case with most of the bad copyright opinions coming from the CAFC, ie. the patent appeals court that's currently stuffed with IP maximalists.

Oracle sued Google for copyright and patent infringement. Today's decision has to do with the fair use defence in the copyright portion of the lawsuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

I understand that. I'm saying that the same people that are patent trolls would add misuse of copyright to their set of tools if it became that became a viable option available to them. Today's patent trolls would just be called IP trolls, but they'd be the same set of people.

Copyright is already misused to perform DCMA takedowns of fair use and is a well known option available to all comers. I think the classic example was the Prenda lawsuit firm.

Prenda made its money by suing people who allegedly downloaded pornographic films online. Its targets frequently agreed to settlements worth a few thousand dollars rather than facing a courtroom process. These copyright trolling tactics netted the company more than $6 million between 2010 and 2013.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/prenda-law-porn-...

I mean, that article is about how the Prenda saga ended with the lawyer disbarred and in prison.

If his strategies had ended up a valid, legal option we would absolutely see trolls expanding into this. John Steele was testing the waters and got eaten by the deep acting as a warning for how not to go about this.

There's some DMCA takedowns and such still, but they aren't quite lucrative enough to show up on patent trolls' radars. Aquila non capit muscas and what have you. A several billion dollar copyright claim like Oracle's passing SCOTUS muster absolutely would have shown up on their radar though.

> the same people that are patent trolls would add misuse of copyright to their set of tools

Prenda is an example of how misuse of copyright is already in the trolls' toolbox.

Since you think about this stuff you might find the latest on the Santa Cruz Operation interesting:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/xinuos-finishes-pick...

Xinuos is the company that purchased the remnants of the SCO Group in 2011. The SCO Group, in turn, is a company most famous not for its actual products but for its litigation against IBM and Linux. That litigation began in 2003—partially funded by a very different Microsoft, only five years after the leak of the Halloween documents in which Microsoft acknowledged the "long-term viability" of open source software and discussed strategies to choke it out of the market.

I looked back at SCO v IBM on Groklaw. SCO wanted to claim copyright infringement over IBM's use of code from Project Monterrey, but they tried to add it too late, and the judge wouldn't let them amend the case yet again. Well, this Xinuos nonsense looks the the copyright version of that exact claim.

And that's probably not going to go anywhere either. Yes, there's the occasional attempt, but it's a set of fringe actions that don't turn out great for the agressor rather than a well trodden playbook that will probably earn you many millions like patent trolls can expect.

To be pedantic, this part of the case is about copyright law, not patent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

The first phase of the case lasted from 2010 to 2015. Oracle successfully established that APIs are copyrightable, but their claims of patent infringement were rejected. Google petitioned the Supreme Court in October 2014 to review the case, but this was denied. A second petition by Google in January 2019 included the judgement that APIs are copyrightable. The Supreme Court agreed to review this part of the judgment in November 2019.

To the degree that SCOTUS has found that an API can be copyrighted, there is still room for copyright trolls to operate.

At least in the US

Which, for now, is the global hegemon in software and tech at large. Any US court decision is extremely important to the whole industry.

US copyright law and interpretation tends to get exported through trade deals and other forms of political and economic pressure.

While true, APIs have specifically not been copyrightable in the EU for some time, I'm not sure about the cad else in other countries and regions.

That's always just a treaty away from changing.

There is a tendency, but it's not deterministic. When it does happem, it's more often for the broad strokes than this kind of detail, see eg sw patents.

Did Oracle also sue Google in other countries outside of the US? To my knowledge we didn't need any saving in this respect in my country.

Doesn't matter, as GDPR showed having something that's troublesome to sell or distribute in certain (critical) markets is a huge, massive roadblock for most companies. Software patents are worth s*t in the EU, but still we had to endure year of hassle when installing MP3s and such on Linux due to most distros having to also comply with the US market.

It is going to open a big door for people who reimplement APIs.

In particular, social-media aggregators (one app to display your Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc.) may have new protections.

I don't know about that. The issue at hand there isn't implementation of APIs, it's using an existing API (run on existing infrastructure) in a way that the social media company does not approve of. Isn't that more an issue of unauthorized access than of copyright?

I assume this means that Amazon can ignore the Elastic and Mongo licenses when building compatible implementations?

So can other vendors with S3's api.

Now it's legally possible to SaaS MinIO and sell S3 storage to customers.

I’d make the case that it instead saved closed source coding.

Open source code is still usually copyrighted. Nobody would trust closed languages and APIs unless they paid a fortune for them while open source with a grant would be safe to use.

It also saved open source software which reimplements proprietary API:s

Why? It wasn’t about whether APIs are under copyright (they are), but whether this particular case constitutes fair use. I think the effect of this decision was way overblown.

If this wasn't fair use, nothing of any substantial value could be considered fair use.

Wine would be a much better example of fair use. It is explicitly made to allow users of linux to run programs written against win APIs. It is not so clear in the Oracle vs Google case, because it is questionable whether Google’s case was really fair use (google pretty much didn’t want to pay Sun for the mobile license and the whole thing was done as cost saving) - hence the very long timeline of the case.

Well, regardless of your opinion, this ruling means that Google's copying of the Java SE API is a perfect example of fair use.

I didn’t say that it wasn’t fair use, but it would have ended much sooner if it would have been trivially fair use.

The dissent explains how Android fails three of the four fair use tests. I'm not sure what the majority was smoking when they wrote this, but far better examples of fair use exist, especially uses that are noncommercial and especially are noncompetitive with the original.

Java was a mobile OS before Android literally obliterated the market after copying Java. Arguably, if Android was fair use, everything is fair use and all software copyright is fundamentally defeated by this ruling.

The dissent is a bunch of garbage written by someone who clearly doesn't understand anything about what he's talking about.

He complains about the names of functions being "expressive content". Yeah, "max" and "toIndex" are real expressive.

Also, what the hell is this logic?

https://twitter.com/KardOnIce/status/1379080086880665606/pho...

It definitely sends a message. And the stakes were so high that the message is know very loud and clear, too.

> whether this particular case constitutes fair use

The English common law system relies heavily upon judicial precedent. A ruling in this particular case that the copying of an API constitutes fair use will inform decisions in future cases of similar copying.

Justice Thomas clarifies why this case has wide-reaching impact in his dissent.

"Congress rejected categorical distinctions between declaring and implementing code. But the majority creates just such a distinction. The result of this distorting analysis is an opinion that makes it difficult to imagine any circumstance in which declaring code will remain protected by copyright."

I concur with Thomas (not in the connotation - he thinks this is a bad thing, I do not - but in the denotation). This ruling is such strong precedent that almost any API cannot be bound by copyright that no company is going to be willing to spend the money to raise the question.

I think Thomas makes a mistake in disregarding the reason for introducing the distinction between declaring and implementing code. The law (as I understand it - IANAL) doesn't exhaustively enumerate what does and does not constitute fair use. Therefore, any specific instance of fair use is bound to introduce new distinctions that are not specifically mentioned in the law itself.

In this particular case, Google's copying of interfaces was ruled to be fair use because its purpose was to allow Java developers to reuse their skills. This reasoning only holds for the declaring parts of the copyrighted work though. And that's why the distinction becomes necessary even if Congress rejects it as a primary distinction between copyrightable and non-copyrightable work.

That's also why I think the ruling is perhaps not quite as broadly applicable as some (including Thomas) are thinking right now. It may not cover code that isn't used by a significant number of developers. I haven't read the entire ruling, so I'm not sure whether it covers non-public interfaces that are nevertheless useful for interoperability. Such interfaces were at the center of past disputes (I think Microsoft's SMB protocol was one such case).

Good, now can we get a ruling that prevents Google, RedHat, Microsoft and others from wrecking FLOSS projects with their stifling influence?

Or prevent them from eradicating competing or even original projects by doing hostile rewrites or forks?

Should we also get rid of all of GNU's hostile rewrites?

People seem to frequently forget that GNU was largely a GPL reimplementation of proprietary software.

> Or prevent them from eradicating competing or even original projects by doing hostile rewrites or forks?

Wouldn't this directly contravene the findings in this case?

Why would you prevent someone from writing whatever code they want, as long as it is FOSS? That's hypocritical, considering that doing whatever you want with the code is one of GNU's main tenets ("free as in freedom")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com