In English please?
The other important piece of the analysis is as follows: copyright protection applies automatically as a work is created and takes a tangible means of expression; however, you cannot sue for infringement of a copyright work unless it is registered as a federal copyright with the Copyright Office.
The Google motion contends that Oracle registered the entire work (Java) and not any subset of that work. Oracle claims it was registered as a "collective work" and that this gives it the right to sue on a component part of the work only. In its motion, Google says that the work was not registered as a collective work and that Oracle therefore can't - as a matter of law - sue over a component piece only.
The motion turns on technical issues but they are ones that would seem to be verifiable one way or the other and thereafter tested under the legal standards just summarized. If the Java registration fails to meet the test, the Oracle loses on its copyright claims as a matter of law (meaning the judge tosses it and it doesn't even go to the jury).
This is truly a bombshell and appears to have caught the Oracle attorneys completely off stride. We will see what happens.
To that end, you could go ahead and copy pieces of the copyrighted work, but you would still be subject to lawsuits by the people that wrote the original individual piece. You just wouldn't be subject to lawsuits by Oracle. It's still infringement, but Oracle isn't the infringed party.
Back in the Java5 days some APIs provided by Java were simply javax.something wrapped around org.apache code.
If anyone is tempted to start spinning the English meaning of the term "collected" to point out how in some sense a song is often a collection of a lot of other elements that may be further copyrighted, stop. The English meaning is not the relevant one, the legal meaning is. A single song is not, legally, a collected work, it is a single work.
If anyone is tempted to construct some exceptional song-like thing that is also a collected work, yes, very good, you've got your thesis topic for your copyright class all laid out, but it is an exception, not the rule.
Also, for the record, that wasn't the question I was trying to forestall with my last paragraph. I was more after someone doing something bizarre like creating a multi-hour "song" where each "instrument" is a full other song loaded as one big sample or something. Generally speaking the answer to this sort of trickery is "You're a programmer, and you're using thought processes designed to slip things past computers. Judges are human." There are certainly ways to "slip things past" a human judge as well, but they are very different. Human judges generally react poorly to outright sophistry, where computers don't mind it one bit.
If copying individual elements (all the chapter titles) of a work is fine, how is it that it is unacceptable to make an original song that contains a 5 second sample of a single instrument from another song? Both are copying a very small excerpt from a larger work.
From my point of view, your question is odd because you've made up both parts of the if clause from whole cloth. Copying "individual elements" may or may not be fine, and five second samples are just plain irrelevant to the discussion being had.
Again, "collective work" is an important term here. It is not clear to me that you understand what that means, and generally trying to answer questions based on deep misconceptions gets nowhere fast. If you really care you're going to have to go pick up some basics from not-an-HN-comment.
What constitutes a single work is basically what a person on the street would answer is a single thing. What constitutes a collective work is basically what a person on the street would call a collective work, after they answer the first question. (That is, if you start here they might say an album is one work, but if you get them to agree that a song is one thing once they probably won't say that.) What constitutes copying is basically what a person on the street would agree is copying. That certainly isn't good enough advice to go off of if you're going to try to build a business off of it or something, and edge cases abound, but the core concepts aren't anywhere near as screwed up as you might think. The problem isn't conceptual with copyright, it is how the concepts are used and abused.
The list of songs on CD isn't copyrightable -- it's a fact, not a creative expression. Taking a 5 second sample is most likely to be considered fair use.
I don't think any of this is too far off from common sense.
To the point below assuming a mashup is made by licensing samples from other works (avoiding fair use issues for a second) the Mashup would be a copyrightable work. But the authors of the individual samples still retain their own copyright.
However U.S. copyright law does have a statutory limit on how retroactive registrations can be. If you file a registration within 90 days of first publication, the registration is retroactive to the date of publication; but if you file more than 90 days from publication, registration is only effective from the date of registration.
Fwiw, even with unregistered works you have some options available to you, just not damages. For example, you can file a DMCA takedown notice.
An exception is foreign works, whose owners can file a suit without first registering, since treaty obligations don't allow the U.S. to subject foreign holders to "formalities". However foreign holders are limited to recovering "actual damages" in such suits, and need to register to be eligible for per-copy statutory damages.
In general, copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection. Even though registration is not a requirement for protection, the copyright law provides several inducements or advantages to encourage copyright owners to make registration. Among these advantages are the following:
• Registration establishes a public record of the copyright claim.
• Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U.S. origin.
• If made before or within five years of publication, registration will establish prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate.
• If registration is made within three months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney’s fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.
• Registration allows the owner of the copyright to record the registration with the U.S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing copies. For additional information, go to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website at www.cbp.gov/.
Registration may be made at any time within the life of the copyright. Unlike the law before 1978, when a work has been registered in unpublished form, it is not necessary to make another registration when the work becomes published, although the copyright owner may register the published edition, if desired.
>However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection.
>Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U.S. origin.
I'm having a hard time understanding what it means to have automatic copyright when a work is created... but you can't sue for infringement. What kind of implicit protection does your work have if you can't take such action?
Therefore, once you create a qualifying work, you have a fully perfected copyright immediately. You just can't sue on that interest for infringement until you have taken the additional step of registering the copyright. You can, however, register at any time prior to filing an infringement action, even if that is many years after the copyright was created. For enforcement purposes, then, it is basically a 2-step process.
Oracle's problem is that it is at the tail end of a trial and has no ability at this point to do anything about registration. If Google is right concerning the motion, Oracle will be out of options on its copyright claims.
Say you write an short story. And you file a copyright for it with the copyright office.
Now, an anthology editor reads your story and wishes to include it in a collection of short stories that he is preparing. It contains, say 20 other short stories as well. This anthology is a "collective work". The anthology editor did not have copyright over the individual stories - he probably only has certain royalty arrangement with each individual author. But the editor can certainly copyright the layout of the anthology. Maybe he put together a brief intro for each story, maybe he ordered them in some artistic fashion based on progression of ideas in the stories etc. This would be a "collective work" copyright. Under a collective work copyright, the editor could sue another editor for producing a substantially duplicate anthology for copyright infringement. But if another magazine published just one of the stories by itself, the editor could not claim copyright infringement.
So in the case of oracle, oracle could have copyright the design of each API individally, and then also copyrighted the entire collection of APIs, thus copyrighting the "collective work" representing the entire language API. But they didn't. They only copyrighted the entire collection as a single work. Thus they (supposedly) cannot claim copyright infrigement when only a small part of it might have been copied by google. (I am not quite certain here).
What oracle is claiming instead - is that they copyrighted Java as a "collective work". which would allow them to claim copyright over the design of the entire API design, rather than just the source code of API implementation. They claim that this design is their creative input. But in this case, then they would also have needed to copyright individual APIs if they wanted to sue for infringement in those individual APIs. Otherwise they could only sue if someone someone copied the entire (or a very substantial part of) the design. They did not copyright those individual pieces.
Back to the analogy:
According to groklaw, Oracle actually copyrighted the entire anthology as an original single work. Oracle claims it copyrighted the anthology as a "collective work" - this is under question. Also, if it DID actually copyright the anthology as a collective work, it seems they did not file copyrights for the individual stories. As a collective work, thus, they can sue for infringement if another anthology is published with substantially the same layout, copying the creativity that went into putting the anthology together. But, if someone copied just one of the stories, they might not be able to sue for infringement as that would not duplicate the creative work of the anthology itself.
On the other hand, if they claim to have copyright the entire anthology as a single work, then if someone copies just the titles of each story and publishes another anthology with different content but same titles for each story, it might not count as infringement.
At least thats my understanding.
My understanding is that Oracle cannot sue Google over the small portions without either having registered copyrights for the individual APIs, or proving that those APIs originate with Oracle and were not contributed under license. Oracle apparently didn't do the former, and has not yet done the latter.
1) You can't claim ownership of the idea (the APIs) rather than the creative writing (the implementation).
2) The API declarations are not copyrightable for the same reason that you can't copyright a short phrase, like "Mary shears sheep." Furthermore, Google needed to be precise in copying the signatures, since changing would lead to incompatibility (with both the programmer's assumptions and their existing Java code).
3) The stuff that Google copied verbatim (or close to verbatim) was negligible. The ONLY thing that Google copied that was actually distributed on a phone was a 9-line function called rangeCheck() that any novice could write. It was only included because Josh Bloch used it when writing an alternative sorting method that he thought would eventually be merged into the Arrays class (where it would have direct access to the original method). Everything else is test classes and a couple of comments.
As part of this argument, Google tries to argue that the infringements are negligible with regards to the "work as a whole," which they argue is all of J2SE 5 (as that is how Oracle registered the copyright). I don't think this argument stands up. Oracle cites plenty of previous copyright cases where the judge has considered less than the overarching work as the "work as a whole" (for example, a defendant tried to argue that the article they had copied verbatim from a magazine was a small piece of the work as a whole (the magazine itself), but the judge considered the article itself to be a work. In this case it was still determined that the article was used under fair use provisions however).
4) Google's documentation of the APIs doesn't infringe. First, they are similar in substance because they are talking about the same idea. Programmers have common terminology and ways of talking about ideas (in this case, what a method/class does) that become more similar when you consider the fact they are trying to be succinct and unambiguous. Second, they are similar in organization because they use the Javadoc tool, which automatically generates docs from comments attached to the API declarations themselves. In other words, if the APIs are not seen as infringing, then neither can the Javadoc structure. They should not be considered a separate act of infringement.
5 and 6 were less interesting to me and were more about Google trying to get off on a technicality, so I don't summarize them here.
An API is hardly just a bunch of short phrases that all programmers use as common parlance. That's That's why Software Architects as a sub-profession exist. Because it requires skill and talent to construct a cohesive, consistent yet technically implementable API.
People that actually work against APIs every day know this.
My particular focus is on API design too, and I know the art that comes into it. But I would say that some APIs DO fall into this. Calling the equals method "equals" and having it take one argument and return a boolean is comparable to a "short phrase". There aren't many other ways to express the concept. When you start to look at a library or component as a whole though, it starts to take on a lot more value and uniqueness. You only have to start comparing mocking or assertion libraries in Java to realize that a huge portion of the differentiation between the libraries (and why people choose one over another) is the way it reads and its expressiveness, not its implementation details. And I think some teams at Google recognize this too, if you look at Guava and Guice.
FTA: "The determination of this issue in favor of Google will either (a) result in the dismissal of the copyright claims or (b) provide the support for Google's de minimis and fair use copying defenses."
TL;DR Oracle shot themselves in the foot. Their claims of copyright infringement are dead or dying.