Hacker News Reader

Comment by FOSSpatents | Hacker News Reader

@btilly My articles on how the lawsuit was going weren't "inaccurate". The district judge ruled against the copyrightability of the declaring code Oracle asserted, and that decision is on appeal. The parties have completed their briefing, numerous amici curiae ("friends of the court") have made submissions, and the appeals court will hold a hearing in a matter of months.

View on HN

The inaccuracies started with your claim to be an "independent" analyst when you were actually a paid shill, and only got worse from there.

You are right that there is an appeal - there always is. But consider that the judge the first time around ruled nothing like you claimed would happen. On anything. Why should we expect the appeal to be different?

@btilly In district court, the jury identified copyright infringement, was hung on fair use (which means that this would have to be determined by a new jury if the relevant code is found copyrightable), and the judge overruled the jury to the effect that the court additionally ruled that certain test files I had published in January 2011 were indeed infringed. The key thing that was missing was copyrightability. You're right that the appeals court might affirm the district judge's ruling, but we'll know in early 2014 what comes out of this. The decision at the appeals court will be made by a panel of three judges, which is quite different from a decision made by just one person.

You don't really need a list of your misrepresentations of reality, but http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120724125504129 may remind you of some of them.

I should note that it was written at a time when you were still claiming to be independent. You know, before you faced the fact that your name was going to be on Oracle's list of paid lobbyists and so you admitted to it up front in the way that made it look as good as possible.

He disclosed his relationship with Oracle four months before the judge asked both companies to "name their shills" [1,2]. It was a highly unusual and controversial order [3], so it's not like Mueller, or indeed anybody, could have predicted this and "come clean" in advance.

Also note that Oracle had that one name on its list. Google had a much longer list. Further, I think the judge erred by not requiring both sides to disclose relevant PR ties, because really, it's the PR companies that oversee the shilling [4, 5]

1. http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/04/oracle-v-google-trial-evi...

2. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/name-your-shills-...

3. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/with-anti-shill-o...

4. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

5. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Facebook-busted-fo...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com