Analysis of Federal Appeals Court Decision in Oracle v. Google | Hacker News Reader

Analysis of Federal Appeals Court Decision in Oracle v. Google

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11 pointsbiehl4 comments

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued this decision, not the Ninth Circuit court that handles appeals from California.

The CAFC is the patent appeals court and takes this case because there were patent issues in addition to the copyright issues. The result is that the decision doesn't have the precedential force in the Ninth Circuit that a real Ninth Circuit decision would. It has little or no precedential force in any US court since the CAFC doesn't routinely take copyright cases.

Being the patent appeals court, the CAFC is captured by the patent bar and known for corruption, IP maximalism, ignoring Supreme Court precedents, and being regularly overturned by the Supreme Court, often in 9-0 decisions. [0] The best evidence that specialized single-subject appeals courts are harmful to justice is the CAFC's abuses. Another decision to harm the software industry by a court that is on a crusade to make software illegal is hardly a surprise. Google should consider a petition for Supreme Court review.

OP is right, of course, that Google and Android are still looking fine in this case.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-a-rogue-appea....

1) No, all developers don't think APIs should not be copyrightable, unless you adopt a "no true Scotsman" definition of "developer". Many commenters on various forums think they should be as copyrightable as any other code. (It's easy to find them: look for the most heavily downvoted comments.) Moreover, most developers who do not agree with the decision (including engineers who testified on behalf of Google) will wholeheartedly agree that writing APIs require all the creative expression involved in writing code.

2) Does anyone really believe Google independently came up with an API from specification that was a verbatim copy of 37 separate API packages? Please. Google's language was specifically crafted to reduce their own liability, but come on, nobody's buying that they didn't copy it wholesale. Maybe when you're grading high school assignments you see coincidental identical code. The API for the stdlib of the most popular programming language currently is not a high school level thing.

1) Then change to "a great majority of developers" instead of all developers

2) This is not what the OP tried to explain.

1) Firstly, [citation needed]. The voice of a hivemind on particular forums is not any kind of data point given that the vast majority of developers don't post anywhere. Further, note that most people on these forums live in a very specific bubble, and seem to suffer a type of Dunning-Kreuger effect regarding either 1) IP, 2) law, 3) programming, or any combination of these.

2) Doesn't matter; a passage like this destroys all his credibility:

> Rather, Google said two separate things: (a) they did not copy any material (other than rangeCheck), and (b) admitted that the names and declarations are the same, not because Google copied those names and declarations from Oracle's own work, but because they perform the same functions. In other words, Google makes various arguments of why those names and declarations look the same, but for reasons other than “mundane cut-and-paste copying from Oracle's copyrighted works”.

Riiiight.

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