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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

> Josh Bloch, who wrote rangeCheck, testified that “[a]ny competent high school programmer could write” that method. RT 815:13-16 (Bloch). Even Oracle’s expert Dr. Mitchell conceded that “a good high school programmer” could write rangeCheck with guidance. RT 1316:24-25 (Mitchell).

Maybe this whole misunderstanding comes from the fact that Oracle just thinks programming is a lot harder than it is.

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There isn't a misunderstanding, Oracle initially made a lot of other copyright and patent claims which were thrown out by the court. Now instead of just yielding the case they've fallen back on arguing that they should be awarded for the copying of a trivial function that any programmer could have written in 2 minutes.

>they should be awarded for the copying of a trivial function that any programmer could have written in 2 minutes //

The crucial question with copyright is "did they copy it". If it's a trivial portion of code that anyone could have written then why go out of your way (assuming the rest of it is not copied) to copy that particular part. If indeed it is not copied then Oracle will not be able to show it was, not even on the balance of probabilities [that's used in civil tort cases in the UK I gather, not sure of the measure applicable here].

It appears to be a bug in the statute if the test is whether the copied part is de minimis. The UK statute IIRC specifies that it must not be a 'significant part', which seems to lean more to qualitative considerations than quantitative ones.

He admitted to copying it. The reason he did so was because he intended to (and later did) contribute the code to Oracle's OpenJDK. He wanted to write it as if it was part of that package, and as such it would re-use the original version of that code. So he went "out of his way" to help Oracle and this is how they've repaid him.

I understand that the circumstances of an ex-employee contributing to an open source codebase and wanting to do things right by not unnecessarily duplicating code might be too much for your average jury, but it should be made clear to those who can understand that this is utterly appalling behaviour by Oracle, rather than a case of a sloppy Google employee getting away with a small amount of IP theft.

It's my understanding that copyright isn't primarily concerned with whether you were looking at the original when you produced the same work. It may be a factor in some cases, but the primary concern is similarity. If the works are the same, the latter work infringes regardless of access to the original. For example, if you write a song which is substantially similar to another song released some time before your own, you've infringed even if you'd never heard the prior work. edit: apparently I am mistaken[1] on this point. My apologies.

The point with this particular code is it's so obvious that many (most?) programmers would come up with the exact same code when given the task. It's part of the bigger picture that code isn't prose, it's instructions. How do you accomplish this task in this given system? First A, then B, then C. The first person to give some simple set of instructions should not be the only one allowed to.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

>but the primary concern is similarity. //

Absolutely not. [Provably] Not copying is an absolute defence.

Yup. aka Clean room design. Alas, not a defense for patent IP.

It's also a pretty obvious implementation. In fact, the function is so simple, it's hard to implement in any other way.

And even 2 minutes is a stretch.

> Even Oracle’s expert Dr. Mitchell conceded that “a good high school programmer” could write rangeCheck with guidance. RT 1316:24-25 (Mitchell).

Nonsense. In HS I wrote my first 3d graphics engine in Pascal on a 80286 with a Hercules graphics card and a monochrome monitor. As a sophomore. Of course I had guidance to get to that level but no programming student past intro would need any help for rangeCheck.

rangeCheck is trivial. Any non-programmer could have written it as the first thing they ever created if they had a book next to them.

At this point Oracle's claims are asinine. The whole thing would be laughable if it wasn't such a huge waste of time/money.

I agree that rangeCheck is trivial and needn't be protected, but I'm not sure I understand the "high school programmer" argument. A highschooler could also write Rebecca Black's "Friday" (indeed, one did), but it's still protected by copyright.

Is any code written by a High School student automatically uncopyrightable?

Well that's about as far from a valid analogy as you're likely to get. Rebecca Black's "Friday" is the entire work, and if you told any high school student "write me a song" they'd probably never come up with that exact song.

But something like the rangeCheck function is what you'd get if you asked a junior programmer "before you're going to access that datastructure make sure your within its range". Furthermore it's a completely irrelevant part of Android as a whole which gave Google no competitive advantage whatsoever.

Did you read the article? It explains this in detail. A couple of things here.

First, trivial bits of a work with minimal creative expression are not covered by copyright. This sort of thing is called "de minimis". You can't assert copyright, for example, on the words "You're welcome" just because they appeared in a work you've copyrighted. If you could, you'd certainly be rich, but that kind of rent seeking is a little beyond the purpose of copyright. Rebecca Black's "Friday", as awful as it may be, is full of creative expression. Google is arguing that rangeCheck is extremely minimal and perfunctory, kind of like if it were accused of copying the word "Partying" from Rebecca Black.

Second, IIRC Oracle is making a big deal out of this copying. Google was willing to pay a statuory fee for its indiscretion just like it would if it had actually used a trivial function from a high schooler, but Oracle is trying to make this function out to be a difficult and important part of Java, meaning it deserves a share of Google's profits.

> A highschooler could also write Rebecca Black's "Friday" (indeed, one did)

Actually, the song was created by ARK Music Factory, as described on their Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARK_Music_Factory

Rebecca Black's parents paid a couple thousand bucks for the privilege of having their daughter sing it and make a music video around it.

No, of course not. The legal argument here is to determine if these lines fall under a de minimus exception. Quoting: "Courts find a use de minimis only if it is both quantitatively and qualitatively insignificant."

As there's only 9 lines of code, that's quantitatively small. The continual references to 'high school programmer' is to argue that it's also qualitatively small. Hence, de minimus.

You are correct, but I think in this case there are only so many different ways to write a range check function, and probably a few obvious ones. If you get 100 programmers to write a range check, there will be a lot more overlap than if you get 100 songwriters to write a chorus... even if they are teenagers.

> A highschooler could also write Rebecca Black's "Friday" (indeed, one did)

I doubt that a) Rebecca Black came out with it in two minutes and b) hers is the most obvious implementation of "song".

The point is not that it could be written by a high schooler once, but that, given the same constraints, it could be written by a high schooler again without ever having seen the original.

If I could give you a vague description of "Friday" and you could immediately go and produce the exact lyrics and melody that Black did, I'd say it wouldn't deserve copyright protection either. Of course, "Friday" is far more complex than that.

You either didn't read the article, or didn't understand it.

They don't think that. They're just grasping at straws. Now that their efforts to show reasonable evidence that Google infringed on something substantial from them failed, they grasp at the last piece of remaining evidence and intend to ride this to the bitter end. And, of course, since it's all billable hours, the longer and stupider the argument becomes, the better. If they need to spend a year in the court arguing about if rangeCheck has enough characters to be copyrightable, it's all win for the lawyers, as the alternative is to admit the defeat and look for another client wanting to lose a copyright case. Why Oracle continues to pay for this circus is less understandable, but I guess they're just too committed to it to just say "OK, we give up, all our claims turned out to be nothing but baloney, thanks for playing". I guess they want even the tiniest bit of win to be able to claim they didn't do it for nothing.

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