Oracle can't copyright parts of Java - court ruling | Hacker News Reader

Oracle can't copyright parts of Java - court ruling

reuters.com

60 pointspmjordan9 comments

Groklaw version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4050490 / http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120531172522459

I flagged this version in favor of groklaw's because TFA is very unclear and misleading.

from " http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/31/3055620/oracle-java-api-no... "

" Judge William Alsup ended the discussion today, ruling that the SSO of the APIs is not covered under current copyright law — and dismissing Oracle's related claims outright. "

Thanks

TFA borders on completely useless

Curious what impact (if any) this would have on open source licenses.

Given that Google effectively (and now legally) lifted Apache Harmony for their own use does that mean I could do the same with any open source project including those under GPL ?

Harmony was the work of the Apache Software Foundation, available under the liberal Apache License. It's very different from the GPL.

I know what Harmony is and the difference between the licenses. But Oracle asserted copyright despite the license.

But this case effectively means that code can not be copyrighted does it not ? I was wondering whether that meant that the GPL's copyright restrictions still applied.

Oracle claimed that the APIs were under copyright protection (there was also a claim or two about code, but that was resolved in phase one).

This decision means that the Structure, Sequence, and Organization (SSO) of an API is not eligible for copyright protection. In short, in this case, it means the specification that makes java java (as opposed to python, ruby, c, etc.) can not be copyrighted.

Note, this does not refer to a document that contains the specification or an implementation of java. Both of those are an expression of the SSO of the java API, and can be protected by copyright.

Oracle asserted copyright over the API - or at least that's my understanding.

> I was wondering whether that meant that the GPL's copyright restrictions still applied.

I'm certain the FSF never intended the GPL to cover APIs, which is what this was about; the GPL is all about granting conditional rights to redistribute the code that implements APIs. (The GPL also explicitly disclaims any ability to control mere usage of the code it covers.)

In C terms: An API is a .h file, an implementation is a .c file. (Unless you put actual function definitions in your .h files, which I have seen done, but that's more of a C++ thing than a C thing.)

If this sounds like Oracle was attempting to trample on rights that developers have always assumed everyone has (and are therefore not fit subject for a license), that's because it is. Had Oracle won on this count, and continued to prevail, the software industry in this country would have come to a screaming halt.

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