<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;google-wins-trial-against-oracle-as-jury-finds-android-is-fair-use&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;google-wins-trial...</a>

Yep Sarah Jeong @sarahjeong, and Parker Higgins @xor (of EFF) both did great jobs in communicating about the trial. They both provided an account along with some context.Sarah&#x27;s reporting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storify.com&#x2F;sarahjeong" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storify.com&#x2F;sarahjeong</a>Parker&#x27;s story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;stakes-are-high-oracle-v-google-public-has-already-lost-big" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;stakes-are-high-oracle...</a>

That&#x27;s one way of looking at it. But using a medium where people expect short, frequent updates rather than a 10,000 word article has its advantages.

Well she also publishes stories on motherboard so what are you trying to say exactly...?

No. You&#x27;re allowed more than 140 characters because you can tweet more than once. The real time updates were invaluable.

&gt; tweets&gt; reporting done rightI&#x27;m not sure. Surely it would only benefit her if she weren&#x27;t limited by 140 characters, right?

I&#x27;d also just like to give huge props to Sarah Jeong for keeping up such a high-quality live stream of tweets over the course of the entire trial. That&#x27;s reporting done right.

A short summary:* Oracle sues Google on copyright grounds.* Case is overseen by Judge Alsup, who taught himself Java in order to understand the technical merits of the case. Case is split into two phases: copyright and patents.* A jury finds Google to be infringing on copyright, but deadlocks on the fair-use defense. The jury finds Google to be non-infringing on all patents.* Judge Alsup breaks the jury&#x27;s deadlock on copyright by ruling that APIs are not copyrightable in the first place.* Oracle appeals the patent claim, Google simultaneously appeals the copyright claim (it wasn&#x27;t 100% in their favor).* The Federal Court of Appeals (9th Circuit) hears the case due to the patent portion. It overturns Alsup&#x27;s decision, declaring that APIs are in fact copyrightable. It remands the case back down to Judge Alsup.* Google petitions the Supreme Court to hear the case instead, but the Court declines the request.* Judge Alsup oversees a second trial, this time solely on the fair-use merits.* The jury finds that Google&#x27;s use of the APIs indeed falls under fair use.

I&#x27;ll admit to not really understanding the path this has taken through the courts - I haven&#x27;t been following that closely though.

Now we have to hope this doesn&#x27;t get overturned by a Circuit judge like it did before. Still, this is excellent news.

Nope.  Oracle can appeal to the Federal Circuit.

This is already the retrial, I&#x27;m pretty sure it&#x27;s dead now.

Am I correct that they can only appeal an incorrect application of the law, but not the facts of the case? (Including the facts the Jury has decided.)

Oracle can appeal all they want to the CAFC. Overturning a unanimous jury verdict is a herculean task.

What is the room for appeals here?This is a massive ruling, heres to hoping it stands

April 28th, 2016 according to vagrant on my Mac <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.virtualbox.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Changelog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.virtualbox.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Changelog</a>At least I think it is pretty cool (and very gracious of Oracle)

When&#x27;s the last time Oracle has built &quot;cool stuff&quot;?

Hopefully soon we can stop focusing on legalities and get back to building cool stuff.

Great news to a degree. It still means APIs can be copy-written which is a bit unfortunate in my opinion. But they won on fair use which is still a victory.Anyways I wonder how long this is going to keep going on for as I&#x27;m assuming Oracle will appeal.

What?This case had literally nothing to do with copying code.

No it&#x27;s not. It effectively means I can copy code without respect to the original author&#x27;s rights, slap a new license on it, and call it a day. As long as it&#x27;s under the guise of some higher ideal of software development -- which we know from historical accounts this was definitely not the case.

Great news! This is a win for us software devs :)I&#x27;d like to note that Ars Technica&#x27;s coverage of the trial has been excellent throughout.

Nelson Muntz would rejoice at this verdict. Oracle&#x27;s claim was laughable.

It&#x27;s the opposite, in that instead of the jury overruling the judge on law (normally the province of the judge), the judge overrules the jury on the ultimate factual question of liability (normally the province of the jury). The required showing is accordingly exacting (though hardly impossible to meet in practice): no rational jury could have reached the same conclusion.

In a sense, in that you could view any post-verdict judgement contrary to the verdict as a ruling that the jury attempted nullification of the law where it lacks the power to do so (nullification is only a power juries can exercise to return criminal not-guilty verdicts, other than that, courts may set aside the jury verdict of no reasonable jury could find the facts necessary to the verdict returned on the evidence presented.)

Would that be like Oracle arguing jury nullification? It seems that the case law on nullification is that the jury&#x27;s verdict is the definition unless vacated by procedural error. Thoughts?

&gt; We don&#x27;t like the outcome, therefore we question whether the jury knew what they were doing?Actually, that&#x27;s pretty much exactly it. An appellate court is capable of ruling a jury finding as contrary to the weight of evidence. It&#x27;s basically a mistrial ruling -- that the jury did not perform as required -- and therefore permits a retrial. It&#x27;s a pretty rare occurrence, though.EDIT: This seems to be a good review:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.litigationandtrial.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;04&#x2F;articles&#x2F;trial&#x2F;contrary-to-the-weight-of-the-evidence&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.litigationandtrial.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;04&#x2F;articles&#x2F;trial&#x2F;con...</a>Specifically: &quot;Rather, the role of the trial judge is to determine that notwithstanding all the facts, certain facts are so clearly of greater weight that to ignore them or to give them equal weight with all the facts is to deny justice.&quot;So, the basic argument from Oracle could go something like, &quot;The jury did not properly weight the fact that the copy was performed for commercial reasons and therefore cannot be fair use.&quot;

&gt;Oracle&#x27;s strategy going forward, both in post-trial motions and in any subsequent appeal, will be based on arguing that no jury could have applied these factors to the undisputed facts of the case and concluded that the fair use test was met.Didn&#x27;t a jury just do exactly that? I realize Oracle must have an opinion contrary to the ruling else what&#x27;s the point of an appeal, but will that really be the line of attack? We don&#x27;t like the outcome, therefore we question whether the jury knew what they were doing?

I wonder what would happen if they try the Supreme Court now.

&gt; What recourse does Oracle have nowYour parent already answered that question (although I don&#x27;t blame you for not noticing):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Judgment_notwithstanding_verdict" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Judgment_notwithstanding_verdi...</a>

As Rayiner mentions, first they&#x27;ll be a post-trial motion to vacate or overrule the jury verdict. Regardless of how those motions are decided the losing side will appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Only after a Ninth Circuit panel and perhaps en banc panel rules will one side or the other try for a cert petition to the Supreme Court.

They&#x27;ve got post-verdict motions at the trial court, if that fails they can speak to the Circuit Court (I think this will go to the Ninth Circuit now rather than the Federal Circuit, but that may be incorrect.) If they fail their, they can petition to have the Supreme Court take up the case (their refusal to take up a different question in an interlocutory -- prior to final judgement -- appeal previously shouldn&#x27;t be considered a strong signal of whether they would take the same or a different question on appeal of a final judgement.)At the Circuit and Supreme Court level, expect Google to cross-appeal against the copyrightability issue again (the Ninth Circuit might well rule differently than the CAFC did applying -- in theory -- Ninth Circuit precedent, and in any case I think they&#x27;ll need to do so at the Circuit level to keep the issue alive for the Supreme Court, which may week take the issue up on a final speak though it declined to do so on an interlocutory one.)

&gt; it sounds like by the letter of the law Google&#x27;s use was not &quot;fair use&quot;One of the many things that makes fair use tricky is that the statutory factors aren&#x27;t exclusive: 17 USC 107 just says that &quot;the factors to be considered shall include&quot; the 4 factors.The letter of the law for fair use is often not all that helpful.

Agreed, it sounds like by the letter of the law Google&#x27;s use was not &quot;fair use&quot;, if you grant the assumption that APIs are copyrightable in the first place.What recourse does Oracle have now? Didn&#x27;t the Supreme Court decline to take this issue up last time round? Does that mean this case is closed?

It&#x27;s always going to be tougher to get a no reasonable jury finding on a factor test like that than an element test. Implicit in a multi-factor test is that the weighing of the importance of the various factors with respect to each other is left to the trier of fact.

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;1) Is incomplete. There should also be explicit mention of the creation and extension of open software ecosystems, which are of tremendous public benefit in both commercial and nonprofit forms. I guess this is partially covered by (4).

Good point about factor #4. But (in light of dragonwriter&#x27;s comment below): wasn&#x27;t Sun making a play at getting JVM into peoples&#x27; phones before Android stole their thunder? Or am I misremembering the timing?

As to factor number 1, the purpose and character of the infringing use: In the 2 Live Crew &#x2F; Pretty Woman case, the Supreme Court held that just because an infringing use is commercial, that doesn&#x27;t automatically mean it&#x27;s unfair (although it is indeed an important factor). [0]As to factor number 2, the nature of the copyrighted work: For the last 20 years or so, courts have been backing away from the expansive approach of Whelan v. Jaslow and instead using a Computer Associates v. Altai &quot;abstraction, filtration, comparison&quot; analysis; in the end, courts typically hold that copyright protection for functional aspects of software is &quot;thin.&quot; See, e.g., UC law professor (and MacArthur &quot;genius grant&quot; recipient) Pam Samuelson&#x27;s 2013 review of the case law. [1]From what I&#x27;ve read of the facts, number 3 -- the amount and substantiality of the portion used from the copyrighted work in relation to the work as a whole -- might have weighed heavily in Google&#x27;s favor.As to number 4, I didn&#x27;t get a sense whether or not the evidence showed that Android has had a material adverse effect on the market for Java; that weighed heavily in the Supreme Court&#x27;s thinking in the 2 Live Crew case.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supreme.justia.com&#x2F;cases&#x2F;federal&#x2F;us&#x2F;510&#x2F;569&#x2F;case.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supreme.justia.com&#x2F;cases&#x2F;federal&#x2F;us&#x2F;510&#x2F;569&#x2F;case.htm...</a>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&amp;context=nulr" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent...</a>

&gt; there was no driving need to interoperate with a proprietary oneThat&#x27;s highly debatable - both the need for interoperability and the proprietary parts. Making the platform attractive to developers is a driving need making it interoperable is a byproduct of that. And Java was open sourced in 2007.

The supreme court has repeatedly stated that being commercial or not commercial is not the entire point, and the more transformative the use, the less it matters whether it is commercial or not.(see the cite to campbell v. acuff rose, etc)In fact, the precise argument y&#x27;all seem to make is disassembled in that case, because it&#x27;s what the original court of appeals decision was in that case :&quot;The Court of Appeals reversed and remanded, holding that the commercial nature of the parody rendered it presumptively unfair under the first of four factors relevant under § 107; that, by taking the &quot;heart&quot; of the original and making it the &quot;heart&quot; of a new work, 2 Live Crew had, qualitatively, taken too much under the third § 107 factor; and that market harm for purposes of the fourth § 107 factor had been established by a presumption attaching to commercial uses.&quot;They also explicitly said: &quot; The statutory examples of permissible uses provide only general guidance. The four statutory factors are to be explored and weighed together in light of copyright&#x27;s purpose of promoting science and the arts. Pp. 574-578.&quot;

As I see it, only factor 1 clearly weights against Google at all; the other factor you think applied presumably is #4, but Android gaining market is irrelevant to that. The value of or market for Java shrinking compared to what it would otherwise be is what factor 4 is about, and while Oracle no doubt argued this point, it&#x27;s certainly not indisputable.

&gt; You can copyright APIs, but you can&#x27;t tell others how they should be used.What does that mean? What privileges would such a copyright provide? What could I do with the copyright that I couldn&#x27;t do without?

&gt;Oracle were never going to get away with that crap argument. To say that had Google copied all the APIs and created a compatible JVM that would have constituted fair use is laughable frankly.Besides, how is the argument that Google effectively didn&#x27;t copy enough at all consistent with the fair use factor regarding the amount of expression copied?

&gt; Samba never copied anything.According to this case, they did.

If you automatically throw out cases, what&#x27;s the point of having a law enabling and encouraging those cases in the first place? Or maybe a better question is: what would legitimate infringement look like, if what Google did is fair use?I don&#x27;t know if APIs should be subject to copyright or not. I certainly don&#x27;t want them to be. But since APIs have been found copyrightable, it&#x27;s hard to understand how this wasn&#x27;t open and shut for Oracle.

It wasn&#x27;t even really a case (like say, Samba) where copying was necessary to interoperate with a closed, proprietary system.Samba never copied anything.The interoperability argument was simple. Google wanted to use a language that was familiar to most and where developers could take existing code and port trivially. There are developer tools on the market that have done that for decades.Davlik isn&#x27;t drop-in compatible with the JVM anyway.Oracle were never going to get away with that crap argument. To say that had Google copied all the APIs and created a compatible JVM that would have constituted fair use is laughable frankly.Sun also open sourced Java which doesn&#x27;t help them at all, and Oracle somewhat pathetically tried to backtrack on that.That makes Oracle&#x27;s win on the subject matter issue basically a pyrrhic victory for anyone looking to protect their APIs. They&#x27;re protectable, but can&#x27;t be protected in any realistic scenario.The only sensible outcome. Had Oracle won we would have had years of court action in the developer software tools market until someone saw sense and simply ruled fair use in all cases. That may still happen.And if you&#x27;re in the camp that believes APIs should not be protected, this precedent--if it stands--means that you&#x27;ll have to shoulder the expense of going to trial on the fair use issue before winning on the merits.We&#x27;ll have to get to a point where if court action is raised then it will automatically have to be thrown out. You can copyright APIs, but you can&#x27;t tell others how they should be used.

Fair point. I&#x27;m reminded why I don&#x27;t get too familiar with US law in these cases.Starting from &quot;Are APIs copyrightable&quot; all over again? Great......... More legal fees, court time and nonsense.

&gt; Any lawsuits that don&#x27;t end up in the Federal Circuit (which pure copyright suits never do) [...]It seems (based on this case) that you could make that happen by simply throwing in a patent claim, even if you&#x27;d get defeated on that point (which happened to Oracle). Not sure if that&#x27;s a general rule one could exploit, or something that just happened in this case?

&gt; If API&#x27;s are copyrightable&gt; And if you&#x27;re in the camp that believes APIs should not be protected, this precedent--if it stands--means that you&#x27;ll have to shoulder the expense of going to trial on the fair use issue before winning on the merits.worth remembering that since that decision was made by the Federal Circuit, it has no bearing on the rest of the court system when it comes to copyright. There is no place where &quot;APIs are copyrightable&quot; is binding precedent.Any lawsuits that don&#x27;t end up in the Federal Circuit (which pure copyright suits never do) will have to start from &quot;are APIs copyrightable?&quot; before having to make any sort of fair use defense.

Is Dalvik&#x27;s use of the Java API transformative? My understanding of Cambell is that it&#x27;s the Google Image Search scenario: where the thumbnail of the copyrighted work is fair use because it serves a totally different function than the original work.

Errr, you didn&#x27;t do factor one properly :)&quot;Under the first of the four § 107 factors, &quot;the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature ... ,&quot; the enquiry focuses on whether the new work merely supersedes the objects of the original creation, or whether and to what extent it is &quot;transformative,&quot; altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message. The more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use. 
&quot;Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 
510 U.S. 569 (1994)

Thanks. Quite apart from &#x27;Java&#x27; having been open sourced, Schwartz also got up and told everyone this was all OK. Oracle really did face an uphill battle with that since it&#x27;s nigh on impossible to take back.

If anyone is curious to see a summary of Oracle&#x27;s claims to Google&#x27;s copying not being fair use, the slides for their closing arguments are available at Ars Technica: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-oracle-made-its-case-against-google-in-pictures&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-oracle-made-i...</a>Disclaimer: I work for Oracle, though not on Java.

Google didn&#x27;t base their implementation on OpenJDK, even if they had they didn&#x27;t follow the terms in the GPL so (given it was copyrightable and not fair use) this wouldn&#x27;t be a defence.

Open source is just a blanket term for a variety of different licenses with different limitations. Earlier court decisions didn&#x27;t see the GPL license invalidating API copyrights. I guess a poor analogy is that you can use linux code all day long but the Linux trademark is not yours. Nor does Linus personally give you immunity from patents that code might infringe on.

Given the fact that Java is open source and was open sourced in 2006, how does Oracle have a case? I&#x27;m asking legitimately not understanding how this even has a leg to stand on.

Oracle, Inc., and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, clearly.

Who thinks APIs should be protectable? That&#x27;s thought crime.

&gt; They&#x27;re protectable, but can&#x27;t be protected in any realistic scenarioI thought that since the court which ruled that APIs are copyrightable wasn&#x27;t the court which would normally hear the appeal (due ot the patent issue) their ruling doesn&#x27;t set a precedent?

&gt; That makes Oracle&#x27;s win on the subject matter issue basically a pyrrhic victory for anyone looking to protect their APIs. They&#x27;re protectable, but can&#x27;t be protected in any realistic scenario.Good. The CAFC ruling is indefensible, like most everything else that emanates from that court. If nothing else this ruling strikes me as a workaround for having an appeals court that is bought and paid for by special interests. For copyright and patents, the courts are so heavily stacked in favor of major rightsholders, and so abused by them, that for those who favor copyright reform it&#x27;s probably well past the time to hope for rightful justice under the law and better to adopt a &quot;victory at any cost&quot; stance, much like our opponents (i.e. Oracle, etc.) already do.If Google weasels out of liability because of some lame fair use defense that probably &quot;technically&quot; shouldn&#x27;t pass muster, I can hardly give a damn given how often the law is twisted in the other direction already.

It wasn&#x27;t even really a case (like say, Samba) where copying was necessary to interoperate with a closed, proprietary system. Davlik isn&#x27;t drop-in compatible with the JVM anyway.I have seen this argument a lot but it doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. Who says it has to be a drop-in replacement at the binary level to have interoperability value? The source-level interoperability is obviously valuable to developers, why ignore it?

These are the statutory fair use factors the jury was required to consider (17 U.S.C. 107):(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.It&#x27;s a somewhat surprising result, because two of the factors weigh heavily against Google (it&#x27;s a commercial work, and was important to Android gaining developer market-share). Oracle&#x27;s strategy going forward, both in post-trial motions and in any subsequent appeal, will be based on arguing that no rational jury could have applied these factors to the undisputed facts of the case and concluded that the fair use test was met.It&#x27;s also not a particularly satisfying result for anybody. If API&#x27;s are copyrightable, then I can&#x27;t think of a better case for protecting them than in this one, where Google created a commercial product for profit and there was no research or scientific motivation. It wasn&#x27;t even really a case (like say, Samba) where copying was necessary to interoperate with a closed, proprietary system. Davlik isn&#x27;t drop-in compatible with the JVM anyway.That makes Oracle&#x27;s win on the subject matter issue basically a pyrrhic victory for anyone looking to protect their APIs. They&#x27;re protectable, but can&#x27;t be protected in any realistic scenario.And if you&#x27;re in the camp that believes APIs should not be protected, this precedent--if it stands--means that you&#x27;ll have to shoulder the expense of going to trial on the fair use issue before winning on the merits.

&gt; Under the Copyright Act, the judge has discretion to award attorney fees to the prevailing party. [0]I think that&#x27;d be good for the ecosystem as it&#x27;d send a message that there will be consequence for pursuing frivolous lawsuits.

Under the Copyright Act, the judge has discretion to award attorney fees to the prevailing party. [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;505" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;uscode&#x2F;text&#x2F;17&#x2F;505</a>

Wow. I suddenly have a lot more faith in the courts and juries to land sane verdicts in technology trials. Still sad that it takes a billion dollar company to be able to stand up to this (as anybody smaller would be crushed by the trial expense) but let&#x27;s celebrate it none the less.Any lawyers around? I wonder if Google can claim legal expenses back from Oracle.

That was from the first time around in this trial, before it was overturned at the Federal Circuit level and sent back to Judge Alsup for a retrial.

Lesson 1: recursionLesson 2: See Lesson 1

Wait till they hear about mutually recursive acronyms like GNU HURD.

I never realized how entertaining this trial was.Schwartz: &quot;Back in 2009, Android WAS lame.&quot;Google atty: &quot;Move to strike, your honor!&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;xor&#x2F;status&#x2F;730456825649188865" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;xor&#x2F;status&#x2F;730456825649188865</a>

My favourite part:Movement to a few minutes of terse explanations, including what the acronym GNU stands for: GNU is Not Unix.“The G part stands for GNU?” Alsup asked in disbelief.“Yes,” said Schwartz on the stand.“That doesn’t make any sense,”<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;read&#x2F;in-google-v-oracle-the-nerds-are-getting-owned" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;read&#x2F;in-google-v-oracle-the-nerd...</a>

My favourite part of the trial was when the judge told Oracle that a high schooler could write rangeCheck[1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;16&#x2F;1612228&#x2F;judge-to-oracle-a-high-schooler-could-write-rangecheck" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;12&#x2F;05&#x2F;16&#x2F;1612228&#x2F;judge...</a>

Today is a wonderful day for Silicon Valley. Our legal process has demonstrated that it can learn and improve when it comes to Technology.

While I don&#x27;t really agree with the OP, I totally understand the sentiment.
It&#x27;s really an acute issue between legal copyright and the new reality of modern computing.
It used to be that copyright sustained our industries. Pottery, Pattern designs on fabric, and later music and films.In the modern world however, it seems positively damaging, with the likes of China, with no respect for IP and copyright rocketing ahead, most of the innovation happening in the west is in ways to bypass it, GNU is Not UNIX, Lame ain&#x27;t an MP3 Encoder... and the old guard that depended on the old way falling ever further behind.In the days of getting material simply by asking a computer to fetch what you want (and nothing more than a few watts of electricity being consumed to do so) copyright simply doesn&#x27;t make sense in any respect.But I suspect that opinion is just as unwelcome as the OPs.

How so? My understanding was that Oracle was suing Google over the use of an API. This seems quite unreasonable to me but that could be due to my tech background and lack of legal knowledge.

Are you referring to Oracle&#x27;s behavior? I would agree that while it&#x27;s a glorious day, nonetheless the verdict is a chilling reminder of the abuse of IP.

Today is a sad day for Silicon Valley. Our legal process has demonstrated how incompetent it is when it comes to Technology IP protection.

The USSC hasn&#x27;t ruled on copyrightability (they still might in this case, and it&#x27;s anyone&#x27;s guess how they would.)

If other countries follow USSC&#x27;s lead in declaring APIs as copyrightable, many of which have far looser fair use rights than the US, then this could create a lot of headaches, especially since this seems like a very loose interpretation of the US&#x27;s already loose fair-use laws.

It is not the same as agreeing with the lower court - AIUI if they heard it and ruled, the scope of the decision for purposes of precedent would be* &quot;every court&quot; (though not necessarily every case), while declining to hear it does not change the scope or outcome of the prior ruling.* - as with everything in the legal system, there are exceptions and fuzzy lines, and IANAL.

&gt; APIs are copywriteable (so says the Supreme Court)My understanding is that they refused to hear the case at the time. Is that, legally speaking, the same thing as agreeing with the circuit court, or could they have just refused to hear the case for some other reason (e.g. because they wanted to see the ruling on fair use first)?

&gt; APIs are copywriteable (so says the Supreme Court)That decision was not made by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has not heard this case...yet.

The supreme court&#x27;s refusal to hear a case is explicitly not a decision on the merits :)

They also may not have taken the case because it was an interlocutory appeal, and the Supreme Court has a strong bias toward taking appeals of final judgements and avoiding interlocutory appeals unless, in addition to a good reason to take the case, there&#x27;s also a good reason not to let it go to final judgement before taking it.It&#x27;s still possible that the Supreme Court could take this case and Oracle might go back to losing on copyrightability rendering fair use moot.

&gt; APIs are copywriteable (so says the Supreme Court)The Supreme Court denying cert is not an endorsement of a ruling. No precedent is set. They could completely disagree with the lower court&#x27;s ruling but not take the case for any number of reasons: there&#x27;s no split between circuits, so they want to let other opinions develop before taking on a subject, they don&#x27;t believe the case details are a good test case for the subject (something the FSF argued was the case for this suit), etc.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;wex&#x2F;certiorari" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.law.cornell.edu&#x2F;wex&#x2F;certiorari</a>

The challenge is that, taking away what most of us wanted the ultimate result to be, the in a vacuum argument that APIs aren&#x27;t a creative work seems wrong.The problem, however, is that the current fair means test in the US code probably never envisioned something like an API. Arguably, there should be a means test along the lines of &quot;Exists primarily to provide a means of interacting with other copyrighted works&quot; or something along those lines.Essentially, the interfaces shouldn&#x27;t be copyrightable argument is an outgrowth of the fact that, if they aren&#x27;t copyrightable, the fair use protections around compatibility etc. (e.g. in Lotus v. Borland) aren&#x27;t as strong as one might like.

&gt; some APIs really are very good and treating them like an artistic work has benefitsName one benefit. Keep in mind we&#x27;ve been working on the opposite assumption for the entire duration of computing history.

 This is possibly my best-case scenario. APIs are copywriteable (so says the Supreme Court), and this seems reasonable, since some APIs really are very good and treating them like an artistic work has benefits. But implementing them is fair use, preserving the utility of APIs for compatibility. Great news!

&gt; But the fact that Oracle could get this close and spin deceit to a non-technical Jury to decide whether using API declarations from an OSS code-base would in some universe entitle them to a $9B payday, is frightening.Yes this was really a close one. I am breathing a sigh of relief now.

They can appeal, but it is going to be very hard for them to get any revenue out of this court action now. That&#x27;s what this would have been - revenue.

Whew, Oracle&#x27;s lawyers and blind greed doesn&#x27;t get to destroy interoperability for the entire Tech Industry.But the fact that Oracle could get this close and spin deceit to a non-technical Jury to decide whether using API declarations from an OSS code-base would in some universe entitle them to a $9B payday, is frightening.

Congratulations! It&#x27;s a pity that previous decision declared APIs copyrightable. This never should have happened. But at least fair use worked out.I wonder though how universal that ruling would be. Is any reimplementation of APIs going to be fair use, and if not, what are the criteria?

In 2012, court rules Java APIs are not copyrightable. In 2014, that decision was appealed and overruled, declaring Java APIs copyrightable. The case was sent back to determine if Google&#x27;s reimplementing APIs was &quot;fair use&quot; of copyrighted material.Now we saw that trial, where jury ruled on fair use. It was fair use.(nothing to do with any small function, that was in 2012)

So, APIs are still thought as copyright&#x27;able and that was a different trial, right?Now Google was ruled okay to use that single, small function, or what was this about?A little more info would be nice for those who aren&#x27;t following this closely.

No. He&#x27;s a paid consultant to Oracle and Microsoft (see: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;oracle-to-google-which-bloggers-did-you-pay-off-2012-8?op=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;oracle-to-google-which-blogge...</a>) and his employers get their money&#x27;s worth.

Your statement seemed hyperbolic until I followed the link and skimmed a handful of posts. He does indeed come across as someone consumed by hatred to the level of insanity.  Why wouldn&#x27;t anyone link to him?  Its like linking to the Westboro baptist people in a discussion about Christian theology.

Well, IIRC he is (or at least was) an intellectual property lawyer. That may have contributed to him seeming to take personally any limitations on what can be covered by IP.Or maybe not. Most IP lawyers are less unhinged than Muller...

His level of insanity and hatred is beyond belief

If not directly from Oracle than indirectly.

At least according to the man himself, he&#x27;s not (at least not directly).&gt; As you can see, this blog&#x27;s Oracle v. Google anti-unfair trial campaign--not affiliated with any party in any way whatsoever--is continuing.

Out of curiosity, do we know if he is still being payed for this?

In which way was the Supreme Court rulling rigged?

Funny how he mentions a rigged trial, which is exactly what the Supreme Court ruling was. However, they declined to hear again which could effectively mean &quot;You got your copyrighted APIs, now fuck off&quot;.Mueller is so discredited he doesn&#x27;t have any weight at all.

See, as ever, Florian Mueller for a... different perspective: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fosspatents.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;oracle-v-google-jury-finds-in-favor-of.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fosspatents.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;oracle-v-google-jury-find...</a>

Yep, and that fair use argument is why the SCOTUS declined to hear it at the time.  Be interesting to see if it goes back that way or if Oracle decides it&#x27;s not going to get anything from doing so.

The district court originally ruled that APIs weren&#x27;t copyrightable. The appeals court overturned that decision, ruling that APIs were copyrightable, but that it could be fair use. The case went back to the district court for that point, and the jury now decided that it was in fact fair use.

This is the appeal against the appeal.  You can guess what will happen next.

Excuse me here but I have to ask. Is this final? Because I&#x27;ve read that Oracle won the case some time ago.

Perhaps the jury was not as clueless as some here were assuming?

Apis are still copyrightable according to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. That&#x27;s not great, and I hope Congress does something about it for the other languages (eg. C#&#x2F;.NET) that haven&#x27;t yet been whitelisted as fair to use by the judicial system.

I remember that afternoon deserts served in Google restaurants when I worked there were very tasty - I hope everyone is celebrating with a good snack :-)Seriously, I think this is a good verdict. I think that Oracle has been doing a good job sheparding Java, but this law suit really seemed to me to be too much of a money grab.

It costs her time, at a minimum, which comes at the opportunity cost of other money-making ventures.

It costs her money not work while at court.

&gt; Are you sure? Maybe her employers allowed it.Or maybe we can just trust her.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sarahjeong&#x2F;status&#x2F;732215116465213440" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sarahjeong&#x2F;status&#x2F;732215116465213440</a>

I think it cost her money to not be working while covering the case.

As I understand it, she was taking unpaid leave from her day-job at Vice Motherboard (despite then producing full-length articles for Motherboard on the topic).

If you found Sarah&#x27;s coverage of the trial useful, she is accepting payments on PayPal since she was doing it with her own money:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sarahjeong&#x2F;status&#x2F;731687243916529665" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;sarahjeong&#x2F;status&#x2F;731687243916529665</a>

Effort for effort is eye for an eye fallacy.The OP seems to make some mistakes of fact. The decision was not Alsup&#x27;s, but the jury&#x27;s finding of fact: Google&#x27;s use is fair even if API&#x27;s are copyrightable (Alsup believed they weren&#x27;t).For the quote you don&#x27;t understand, I believe the mistake is only in a single character, &#x27;is&#x27; should be &#x27;in&#x27; (to which I present Larry Ellison as the central counter-example).

&gt; No one has a stake is seeing that Oracle be awarded $9 billion in damages just because it bought Sun Microsystems and found an opportunity through its lawyers to make a big money grab against GoogleMy paraphrase: ~[No one outside of Oracle is overly sympathetic to their money grab against Google. Everyone sees their claims as overly-litigious--based on the simple fact of having purchased Sun Microsystems rather than a legitimate defense of their own creative and value-creating effort.]

Wow, your comment doesn&#x27;t even fit in its entirety into my browser window without scrolling. :) For posterity you may want to edit &quot;No one has a stake is seeing that Oracle be awarded $9&quot;, I&#x27;m not sure how to parse that. I didn&#x27;t find any other typos or grammar mistakes which is pretty amazing for a chunk of prose of that length (at least it is for me.)Don&#x27;t know why you&#x27;re being downvoted for giving such a comprehensive and thoughtful comment. Ridiculous really. I say even if you disagree with grellas don&#x27;t donwvote, please reply and put the same amount of effort into the reply as was put into the comment above.

You fear that a Clinton presidency will make Congress pass bad laws?

&gt; The Bono law may have slipped through Congress with nary a dissent in its day but this will not happen again, whatever the lobbying power of Disney and others.What makes you think so? This is one of my greatest fears of another Clinton presidency.

&quot;hypothetical&quot; assumes this has never happened. Copyright and patent laws came into existence because this exact scenario happened all the time.Edit: to counter DannyBee&#x27;s assertion, I&#x27;m referring specifically to this statement -- &quot;it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing such works of the commercial value of their efforts.&quot; The history of copyright starts with printing restrictions to control the flow of &quot;dangerous&quot; information, but the first modern copyright statute (the statute of anne) deliberately came into existence to protect ideas by granting protections to authors of content for n years. Until this point. Copyright was a grant of a printing monopoly.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_copyright_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_copyright_law</a>&gt; The Statute of Anne had a much broader social focus and remit than the monopoly granted to the Stationers&#x27; Company. The statute was concerned with the reading public, the continued production of useful literature, and the advancement and spread of education. The central plank of the statute is a social quid pro quo; to encourage &quot;learned men to compose and write useful books&quot; the statute guaranteed the finite right to print and reprint those works.Comments to DannyBee&#x27;s link address this mischaracterization of modern copyright history. One example: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;questioncopyright.org&#x2F;comment&#x2F;8491#comment-8491" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;questioncopyright.org&#x2F;comment&#x2F;8491#comment-8491</a>

&gt; it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity wouldThat&#x27;s not how facts work. You can&#x27;t say &quot;it is a fact that [hypothetical scenario] leads to [expected outcome]&quot; except in the case of very well understood mechanisms narrowly applied. I don&#x27;t think the sociopolitical effects of copyright law are one of those situations.

&gt; Fewer Oracles. Fewer Microsofts. Fewer Steve Jobs.Was it so bad back when you could just buy software for money? Before business models built on eyeballs and data mining instead of copyright?

&gt; I guess the risk of fewer Taylor Swifts. Fewer Kany Wests. Fewer Oracles. Fewer Microsofts. Fewer Steve Jobs. Those are such small consequences that, to be honest, they might be additional benefits.Most of the public would consider those pretty enormous consequences.Heck, I&#x27;d be upset if I had to switch away from a MacBook Pro to a commodity-PC-hardware + Linux solution for personal use today, even without any of the other things that group of people and companies you mention have produced. And I&#x27;m a-ok with paying for those things, or paying other people for doing interesting things on top of those things.Maybe you think the risk of that actually happening is pretty small, but as-written, the consequences are actually pretty huge.

&quot;We, the US public, out of the goodness of our hearts and wanting to foster art&quot;I was not part of that, and neither was I part of some minority complaining while the majority did this. I don&#x27;t think this ever happened. Just because there&#x27;s a pretense of democracy doesn&#x27;t mean the general public is actually to blame for everything.

&gt; I guess the risk of fewer Taylor Swifts.Are you straight or ironic? Let&#x27;s not forget that, in the current system, labels get served first while those artists remain in debt. It works with the system of advances and invoicing, mostly for tours and TV, but in the present situation I&#x27;ve found the example with album sales: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20100712&#x2F;23482610186.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20100712&#x2F;23482610186.shtml</a>

People complain about the special interests, but some fail to realize that the major backers of Extreme Copyright (TM) are a special interest that we created.We, the US public, out of the goodness of our hearts and wanting to foster art, gave up our right to &quot;repeat what we heard&quot; (copying, when what you hear is digital) in return for incentives to create art.And then bam; decades later the incentives are the de facto baseline, and have been extended with almost no public awareness (let alone debate) using the special interest money that our goodwill created for them.It is the ultimate checkmate of democracy, and if it weren&#x27;t so unjust, you would have to hand it to the media industries for playing so masterfully.Well, good job. You got us. You took the rules we made, and took the public (US, but even more abroad, by exporting your draconian laws via more special interest money) and absolutely destroyed us. You won. Game over.But wait... not quite. The game is politics. And if you had been content to simply swim in your unimaginable Scrooge McDuck pool of gold dubloons, you would swim until the end of time. But the public is finally starting to notice, and the technorati whose careers and employers (like Google) depend on having a level playing field (even though they try to tilt it in their favor when they can) are starting to notice. I&#x27;m not so optimistic that change will come, but if it does, my vote will be for whatever is closest to &quot;burn the fucker to the ground&quot;. And some other people feel the same way.What&#x27;s the possible consequence of such an extreme change? I guess the risk of fewer Taylor Swifts. Fewer Kany Wests. Fewer Oracles. Fewer Microsofts. Fewer Steve Jobs. Those are such small consequences that, to be honest, they might be additional benefits.It would be best if the copyright system were reduced to a smouldering ruin, so that the public could better understand exactly what we gave up when the copyright regime was created, and make a more informed decision about which incentives really are needed to make innovation happen. Until we do, the special interests created by those very laws will continue to make us pay for the favor we gave them.

And &quot;free trade&quot; treaties also have the convenient feature that they can be used for far more than just copyright. It&#x27;s criminal.

That used to be the case, but they&#x27;re not that easy to impose these days. Abuses have been so blatant, and treaties written in such poor manner, that public opinion and media are now &quot;critical by default&quot; of any new treaty. This is particularly true in Europe.

&gt; Copyright maximalists realizing this have moved to circumvent democracy globally by enshrining their most draconian laws into &quot;free trade&quot; treaties.It&#x27;s globalists and internationalists that circumvented democracy. The copyright maximalists are just trying to take advantage of the opening.

&gt; The Bono law may have slipped through Congress with nary a dissent in its day but this will not happen again, whatever the lobbying power of Disney and others.Copyright maximalists realizing this have moved to circumvent democracy globally by enshrining their most draconian laws into &quot;free trade&quot; treaties. These treaties have the proven ability to overturn the will of national democratic bodies and are almost impossible to remove once imposed.

&gt; Well meaning laws that are in practice nearly impossible to meaningfully enforce should not exist - from the beginning as well as when then this reality kicks in. Copyright shares many traits with the war on drugs.Not really, and this is where I think copyright owners have gone off the reservation with their enforcement strategy. The point of copyright isn&#x27;t to keep kids from pirating a few songs, just like the point of property right&#x27;s isn&#x27;t to keep kids from walking across your lawn. That&#x27;s not what&#x27;s going to destroy the value of your property. The point of copyright is to force Netflix and Amazon Prime and Youtube to bargain with you instead of just ripping you off. And that&#x27;s not hard to enforce.

Well meaning laws that are in practice nearly impossible to meaningfully enforce should not exist - from the beginning as well as when then this reality kicks in. Copyright shares many traits with the war on drugs.They were implemented and then continue to stick around way too long in an archaic non-working state - because they were well meaning. But making sure it will actually have the intended effect is not a requirement. The enforcement side is always left to figure it out after the fact. The reality of the law is something that can be delayed, what matters is moral gratification of the policy makers.This is sadly prevalent in American policy: laws always start with good intentions but often ultimately a) causing net-negative via side-effects or b) not enforcable so a giant money&#x2F;time sinkhole. Serious scrutiny beforehand could probably detect the majority of this stuff but that&#x27;s not a requirement in office apparently.

That&#x27;s alright for mere consumption, but what about derivatives? I mean, take a look at fan-fiction - it&#x27;s practically a violation of copyright by definition, and yet it provides a template for budding authors so they don&#x27;t have to invent their own characters and world from scratch to start writing interesting interactions - there are an awful lot of major authors that wouldn&#x27;t have started writing if it weren&#x27;t for fanfiction, by their own admission. For example, 50 Shades Of Grey was originally a Twilight fanfic, but it&#x27;s pretty darn popular as its own unrelated thing now.

&gt; Many today disagree with this because they grew up in a digital age where copyright was seen as simply an unnecessary impediment to the otherwise limitless and basically cost-free capacity we all have to reproduce digital products in our modern world and hence an impediment to the social good that would come from widespread sharing of such products for free.As a creator, I agree with the idea of copyright, but as a consumer, I think you missed the core problem with this statement.I think most people can agree that enforcing copyright is fine: that is, creators should be compensated for their work, if they so choose to be. They should especially be compensated if anyone else is making money from their work.Let&#x27;s pick on the music industry in particular, because they are particularly big abusers and also the ones that messed the whole thing up.One of the places the music industry went wrong was in micro-enforcing exact means of consumption. If they had it their way, I&#x27;d have to buy 3 copies of every song if I wanted to be able to listen in my living room, car, and portable device. Oh, and another 3 copies each every time a new format came out (Vinyl -&gt; Cassette -&gt; CD -&gt; every various DRM form of digital). Further, they tried to restrict which devices you were allowed to use (&quot;this DRM only works on stuff from manufacturer X or Y, not Z and definitely not your home-built custom rig&quot;).This is where they really overstepped, in my opinion. And they did this at the same time that the technology for digital music (MP3) was becoming practical, affordable and mainstream. (As in: fast internet, fast CPUs, affordable storage, and many portable music player products)So what was the result? What would have been an underground and niche world of piracy suddenly was offering for free something that was significantly better than what you got if you paid. Many people even downloaded stuff that they owned on CD, because it was simpler than ripping it. It&#x27;s not a stretch to simply skip the step of paying for the CD initially. Instead of building something even better and easier than Napster (and others), they declared war on their customers.It&#x27;s really not unlike the current climate of ads vs ad blockers: it&#x27;s hard to feel bad for the advertisers after their methods serve malware, obnoxious and intrusive ads, auto-playing video, popups, etc. Most people could tolerate banner ads, just as most people would have been fine paying for their music, but they took it a step too far and ruined it for the whole industry.If the music industry had been okay with format shifting and unrestricted (non-DRM&#x27;d) playback, instead just concentrating on ensuring that their paying customers could listen to the music they bought however they wanted, the industry would probably look quite different today. Sure, there would have been some piracy (both causal sharing among friends and for-profit counterfeits), but there always has been.Instead, they attempted to completely erase piracy and extract every cent they could from their paying customers by controlling everything, and didn&#x27;t care about the collateral damage they were doing specifically to the people trying to give them money. In fact, they want to go even further and put people in jail over it.So to me, at least, it&#x27;s not about free-as-in-beer, I&#x27;m happy to pay for content. But once I pay, I want to be able to listen to it in the ways I want. Forcing me to use a specific manufacturer&#x27;s product to be able to listen to the content is as offensive to me as only allowing me to listen to certain types of music based on the color of my skin.

Your parent poster said &#x27;it is right&#x27;, not &#x27;it is &#x2F;a&#x2F; right&#x27;.You&#x27;re attacking a statement that didn&#x27;t exist in the parent post.

&gt; It is an overloaded term.That is the most computer-programmery way of saying &quot;homophone&quot; or &quot;different sense of the word.&quot;

&gt; There is no such right. It is not a human right, nor is it something that you are intrinsically entitled to have.I disagree with that. To the extent that any rights are &quot;natural&quot; or &quot;human&quot; (as opposed to all rights being creations of the government), I think copyright is entitled to that status more so than say rights in land. My back yard is something that was here before I was born and will be here after I die. I had nothing to do with its creation, and I just bought it from somebody who bought it from somebody who stole it from the Indians. How on earth do I have a greater, more fundamental, right to that than to something I created out of non-existence?If you build a business, you build it on the back of government-educated workers commuting on government-built roads, etc. &quot;You didn&#x27;t build that&quot; and whatnot. But we consider you to have a moral entitlement to own and control your business, without assuming society has any special right to it other than universal obligations like paying taxes. But creative works--while they are influenced by society to a degree--are to a much greater extent singular products of creation. But you want to say you don&#x27;t have a moral entitlement to it?

&gt; It is right that the author of a creative work get protection for having conceived that work and reduced it to tangible form.This is incorrect (and I didn&#x27;t grow up in the digital age, unless you call 4 function calculators the &quot;digital age&quot;). There is no such right. It is not a human right, nor is it something that you are intrinsically entitled to have.Copyright is something that is endowed upon you by the government. It is intrinsically owned by society. You are granted a limited monopoly on copying. If society did not grant you this monopoly, you would not have it. This is how it has worked historically and this is how it is written in law currently.The problem that you may be facing is the &quot;right&quot; in &quot;copyright&quot;. It is an overloaded term. It refers to your legal ability rather than your moral entitlement.Because copyright is not an intrinsic right, but rather a societal grant, it is important that we weigh the societal benefits of this grant. In my opinion, in this case the ability to receive a copyright for an API is counter to the intent of copyright. For example, why can we not copyright recipes or game rules or fashion designs? I won&#x27;t rehash 100 years of legal debate on the subject, but rather give my opinion that similar criteria should be applied here.

Is that your libertarian rationalisation against copyright? Because with that kind of logic we couldn&#x27;t have contracts either (breaching a contract can be non-violent).&gt; And where does copying end, and thought begin?In the same way we decide when a person becomes legally major. We draw whichever arbitrary line seems to make the most sense.

When a casual passer-by records, copies, and disseminates, no physical aggression is committed. The enforcement of copyright law depends on a third-party initiating a threat of force against property, freedom, and life to dissuade such actions.Copying is non-violent, whereas preventing it requires violence. And where does copying end, and thought begin? If I examine source code, or lyrics, or a short story, reflect on them, talk about them, and use what I have gleaned, haven&#x27;t I copied them to some degree?

&quot;The Bono law may have slipped through Congress with nary a dissent in its day but this will not happen again, whatever the lobbying power of Disney and others.&quot;Why? What&#x27;s changed?&quot;Those who are creatively working to change the world - developers - loath having artificial barriers that block those benefits&quot;No, developers won&#x27;t make a single change to the laws as long as those laws protect the rich and powerful from having to work.

Cooyright protects companies&#x27; interest, and companies by default will try to milk as much money as they can from anything, so while your argumentation is very well worded (and I do believe you sincerely mean it in a good way) copyright does very little to protect the author himself but only the corporation that enables him to publish his work in the first place.

&gt; Yet, as much as people believe that information ought to be free, it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing such works of the commercial value of their efforts.It&#x27;s the other way. You cleverly switched the &quot;ought&quot; with the &quot;fact&quot;.What is a fact, is that &quot;intellectual property&quot; is not a real, tangible thing, like physical property. We only reason about IP in this way because we say it is. IP is made of words, the concept is willed into existence by copyright laws, and is only real as long all parties agree (or are forced to) to treat it as such, but the way it works is exactly however we collectively decide it ought to work.That&#x27;s unlike the concept of physical property, which is simply forced into existence, due to the fundamental properties of matter+energy, being that that what is not destroyed or created, nor goes away when you stop believing in it. Properties that actually apply just fine to information too, it exists in the physical world after all. It just represents such a minuscule amount of energy that it appears almost completely free, even when compared to just the energy required to entertain it as a human thought ...Information isn&#x27;t really free, people just get all twisted up about the fact that it&#x27;s fundamentally worth very little, compared to almost anything else. But the information was never the valuable part. If you offer to clean my dirty kitchen, that&#x27;s worth some value ultimately based on energy required to perform the service. Note you can only sell me this service once. If you just tell me about a clean kitchen, that&#x27;s also worth some value ultimately based on energy required to perform the service--roughly the same order of magnitude as the value of the utterance &quot;cool story bro&quot;.We&#x27;re really still very much haggling over the price of information. And the offers on both sides of the table are not even remotely in the same ballpark. Both sides are playing hard, using all the tricks in the book and out of the box.And that&#x27;s possible, all right, I guess. You can force or decide to artificially prop up the price of something way beyond its value. They do that with diamonds and probably many other things. There&#x27;s some tricks that can make that work for a rather long time, even. But ultimately you&#x27;re not extracting value from the thing, but a power differential that indirectly imbues the thing with value.This indirection is a way to create an &quot;ought&quot;, but not a fact.Which is fine in principle, there are many &quot;oughts&quot; I support completely, making up what I believe is good and right. But I accept that I cannot argue those as &quot;facts&quot;, but only in other ways, preferably based on an ethical framework (but if you must, any power differential will do).Now, I believe, and I don&#x27;t know if this is a fact, that the situation is untenable. Maybe I&#x27;m overlooking something, but I doubt even copyright law can artificially prop up the value of information indefinitely. It merely postpones the inevitable crash to its true value. For instance, I am an artist, I can make a beautiful illustration or piece of music, and give it away for free. Not all artists might want to, but enough will to kick the bottom out of the market, if slowly over time.The only way to prevent me from doing that, is to forbid me giving away my work for free, or forbid&#x2F;complicate the public domain. What is what would happen if I offer my work to the world, but I lack the control to keep it free, only for some party that will play the game, to swoop in, assume ownership and sell it as IP even though it is against my wishes. Which I hope you agree would be at least as bad a situation as today&#x27;s content producers crying about piracy=robbery. Yet it is exactly what today&#x27;s audio&#x2F;video streaming services are lining up to enforce. Someone has to own your works as intellectual property, or they will own it for you.And ultimately the content producers get screwed out of their rights, which I hope by now you also see coming from miles away, because the value never came from the content, it came from the power differential enforcing the concept of intellectual property.As a content producer, I&#x27;d MUCH rather get screwed over by piracy (which is available to everybody equally) than giving the large &quot;content industry&quot; corporations the exclusive screwing me, giving them the power to enforce intellectual property rights however they see fit. But don&#x27;t think for a moment that I, small time content producer, will be in control of my content for anything more than its fundamental worth.And either way, as an artist, I&#x27;ll keep producing beautiful things because I enjoy doing so. Regardless.And either way, if you want to make a living off content production, the only way is to sell the service (commission), not the content. Regardless.

I disagree that copyright is a natural right. It is a right that societies bestow to creators to incentive them to create. It has not valid purpose beyond that and is quite unnatural to me.Part of the problem with today&#x27;s law is that it is being pushed as a natural right and a form of justice. This is a fairly recent development, historically speaking.

Law evolves and the law of copyright in particular is ripe for &quot;disruption&quot; - and I say this not as one who opposes the idea of copyright but, on the contrary, as one who strongly supports it.It is right that the author of a creative work get protection for having conceived that work and reduced it to tangible form. Developers do this all the time with their code. So too do many, many others. Many today disagree with this because they grew up in a digital age where copyright was seen as simply an unnecessary impediment to the otherwise limitless and basically cost-free capacity we all have to reproduce digital products in our modern world and hence an impediment to the social good that would come from widespread sharing of such products for free. Yet, as much as people believe that information ought to be free, it is a fact that simply letting any casual passer-by copy and distribute any creative work with impunity would certainly work to rob those who may have spent countless hours developing such works of the commercial value of their efforts. I will grant that this is a social policy judgment on which the law could come down on either side. I stand with the idea of copyright protection.Even granting the correctness of copyright as a body of law that protects certain property interests, there are still many abuses in the way it is implemented and enforced. Copyright terms have been extended to the point of absurdity, and certainly well beyond what is needed to give the original author an opportunity to gain the fruits of his or her labor. Enforcement statutes are heavy-handed and potentially abusive, especially as they apply to relatively minor acts of infringement by end-users. And the list goes on.The point is that many people are fed up with copyright law as currently implemented and, when there is widespread discontent in society over the effects of a law, the time is ripe for a change.I believe this is where copyright law is today.The Bono law may have slipped through Congress with nary a dissent in its day but this will not happen again, whatever the lobbying power of Disney and others. And the same is true for the scope of copyright law as it applies to APIs.Ours is a world of digital interoperability. People see and like its benefits. Society benefits hugely from it. Those who are creatively working to change the world - developers - loath having artificial barriers that block those benefits and that may subject them to potential legal liabilities to boot. Therefore, the idea that an API is copyrightable is loathsome to them. And it is becoming increasingly so to the society as a whole.The copyright law around APIs had developed in fits and starts throughout the 1980s and 1990s, primarily in the Ninth Circuit where Silicon Valley is located. When Oracle sued Google in this case, that law was basically a mess. Yet Judge Alsup, the judge assigned to this case, did a brilliant synthesis in coming up with a coherent and logically defensible legal justification for why APIs in the abstract should not be protected by copyright. He did this by going back to the purpose of copyright, by examining in detail what it is that APIs do, and by applying the law in light of its original purpose. The result was simple and compelling (though the judicial skill it took to get there was pretty amazing).Legal decisions are binding or not depending on the authority of the court making them and on whether a particular dispute in under the authority of one court or another when it is heard.The decision by Judge Alsup is that of a trial judge and hence not legally binding as precedent on any other judge. It could be hugely persuasive or influential but no court is bound to follow it in a subsequent case.The Federal Circuit decision that reversed Judge Alsup and held APIs to be copyrightable is not that of a trial judge and has much more precedential effect. Yet it too has limited authority. The Federal Circuit Court does not even have copyright as its area of jurisdiction. It is a specialty court set up to hear patent appeals. The only reason it heard this case was because the original set of claims brought by Oracle included patent claims and this became a technical ground by which the Federal Circuit Court gained jurisdiction to hear the appeal. But there are many other Federal Circuit courts in the U.S. and the effect of the Federal Circuit Court decision concerning copyrights is not binding on them. There is also the U.S. Supreme Court. It has the final authority and its decisions are binding on all lower federal courts as concerns copyright law.The point is that the battle over this issue is not over. It is true that the Federal Circuit decision was a large setback for those who believe APIs should not be subject to copyright. Yet there remains that whole issue of social resistance and that is huge. It will undoubtedly take some time but the law can and does change in ways that tend to reflect what people actually think and want, at least in important areas. No one has a stake in seeing that Oracle be awarded $9 billion in damages just because it bought Sun Microsystems and found an opportunity through its lawyers to make a big money grab against Google. But a lot of people have a stake in keeping software interoperability open and free and many, many people in society benefit from this. Nor is this simply an issue of unsophisticated people fighting the shark lawyers and the big corporations. Many prominent organizations such as EFF are in the mix and are strongly advocating for the needed changes. Thus, this fight over APIs will continue and I believe the law will eventually change for the better.In this immediate case, I believe the jury likely applied common sense in concluding unanimously that, notwithstanding Oracle&#x27;s technical arguments, the use here was in fact benign given the ultimate purposes of copyright law. I leave the technical analysis to others but, to me, this seems to be a microcosm of the pattern I describe above: when something repels, and you have a legitimate chance to reject it, you do. Here, the idea of fair use gave the jury a big, fat opening and the jury took it.

Agreed. Google may have made a better steward of Java than Oracle. But I don&#x27;t know what tech Google would&#x27;ve directly benefitted from. They could&#x27;ve ported dtrace and zfs (and changed licenses) to Linux.But they&#x27;d have to keep all those support contracts going, which is a pain. That&#x27;s more Oracle-side.

Interesting that you mention that. When I was back in university (early 2000s) there were a few &quot;big companies&quot; to work for. If you cared about having the perks, the money and a cool office, you wanted to work for Microsoft. If you were more of a reclusive neckbeard with a love for the more arcane aspects of computing and networking (like I was), you wanted to work for Sun. It was seen as the place where you&#x27;d be free to work on cool research projects rather than (god forbid!) consumer software. That&#x27;s where the luminaries were.Of course, even back then nobody wanted to work for IBM or HP. Heh.

Yeah. Thank you Sun, for ... everything, including employing the people you employed.

I often wondered why Google didn&#x27;t. Simply owning Java alone and heading off this inevitable nonsense would have been enough reason. This kind of legal stuff is really the only way Sun were going to make money from Java. Heaven knows, Java has continued in spite of Sun, not because of them.The trouble is, they would have had to keep a lot of legacy crap going like Solaris and SPARC which probably wouldn&#x27;t have appealed to them. Sun was, and still is, haemorrhaging cash.

RedHat? I don&#x27;t. Had that happened, Java, ZFS, MySQL, VirtualBox, etc would now likely all be required components of systemd. (Yes, I&#x27;m being a little facetious, but I really believe RedHat has some sinister ulterier motives. They&#x27;ve been absolutely horrible with systemd, Gnome, GTK3, etc.)What happened to Sun was an outright catastrophe, but we&#x27;ve mostly recovered with OpenZFS, MariaDB, Jenkins, LibreOffice, etc. The major piece we&#x27;re missing is a clean fork of VirtualBox. Android&#x27;s also not in a good state to replace desktop Java, but it could conceivably be one day at least.

My understanding is that Schwartz et al declined IBM&#x27;s bid and chose to proceed with Oracle&#x27;s, under the assumption that Oracle&#x27;s superior business record would mean more stability for Sun employees.

Sources at the time told me IBM were planning on buying Sun (for the hardware&#x2F;Telco business) and avoiding anti-trust problems by spinning software off to Red Hat (Java, ZFS, Solaris, etc). They got cold feet over the spectre of bribery investigations against Sun.I weep for the parallel universe in which Red Hat had been in a position to open all of Sun&#x27;s technologies properly.

Despite the win, I think it would have been far better for the computer industry if Google had bought Sun. Unlike other companies with crap (IMHO ... Nokia, Motorola), Sun actually had stuff of value. This is a lesson that geeks get but I&#x27;m not sure MBAs do or will ever get.

Oracle will likely appeal, but they&#x27;ll lose again. Overturning a unanimous jury verdict is very difficult.

So is this really over for good now? Can Oracle appeal and drag this on for another decade?

&gt; &quot;For me, declaring code is not code,&quot; Page said.Unless, of course, the declaring code is declaring declaring code, as in Prolog and its ilk.

Would swizzling methods violate copyright?

I&#x27;m not sure if you misread my questions or I misread your answer. I&#x27;m asking about new opportunities this precedent allows, not existing ones it forbids. For example, the private WoW server case was ruled in favor of Blizzard. With this new precedent, would a court come to the same conclusion?

These kinds of questions are why this court case is so incredibly disastrous. Oracle has really done humanity an enormous disservice here, and any clients of theirs should immediately sever contracts in return for their blatant attempt to destroy software development. I&#x27;m not fucking exaggerating. If you thought software patents were bad, Oracle just unleashed a whole new level of hell.

What impact does this have on reverse engineering private APIs and reimplementing them? And selling those reimplementations?Can I reverse engineer the private API of a mobile app, then implement my own client to talk to its servers?What if I create my own &quot;bridge&quot; API to talk to the private API? Can I then sell access to the bridge API, allowing developers to use the private API of the app through my service?And how does this relate to, e.g. running private world of warcraft servers with modded code that allows purchasing in-game items? (See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themarysue.com&#x2F;blizzard-private-server-lawsuit&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.themarysue.com&#x2F;blizzard-private-server-lawsuit&#x2F;</a>)

Probably because that would force them and anyone extending Android to license their extensions under the GPL. Phone OEMs would probably keep away from that can of worms.

Well that&#x27;s a simple and convincing answer. Thanks.

When Google started Android (2005ish, iirc), OpenJDK didn&#x27;t exist yet.

OpenJDK either didn&#x27;t exist or was in its infancy. Also, Oracle created a lot of confusion in that they tried to argue that even Apache Harmony was in violation.Also, there were a lot of third party drivers and software they couldn&#x27;t use the GPL with. That has now largely disappeared.

What I don&#x27;t understand about this: Why didn&#x27;t Google&#x2F;Android use Java under the Open Source license under which it has been provided. Wouldn&#x27;t that have saved all the trouble?

&gt;Using Wikipedia as an authoritative source...Which is why you can check the references. When the article linked above about copyright is clearly coming from an anti-copyright source, and does not mention multiple important things Wikipedia does, I think any intelligent person realizes the Wikipedia source is more credible.As to overall accuracy of Wikipedia, many, many studies show it is quite accurate. Google and read the evidence.&gt;You claim that the US copyright law was started by authors guildIt&#x27;s not my claim - Wikipedia sourced it. Since you don&#x27;t like it, here [3] are some details with names and dates you can check, and here [4] is a paper titled &quot;The Anti-Monopoly Origins of the Patent and Copyright Clause&quot; with significant details.&gt;three states had already enacted copyright statutes prior to the Continental Congress resolution&quot;The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first federal copyright act to be instituted in the United States, though most of the states had passed various legislation securing copyrights in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War.&quot; [1]And....&quot;Twelve states passed copyright laws prior to the work of the Continental Congress. Delaware chose not to pass a copyright law.&quot; [2]Here [2] is the text of the 1790 Copyright Act. It is completely about protecting author rights - every single section details this. The word author occurs 21 times in a page and a half.For example, (cutting out wordy clauses - go read the original if you doubt this)Section 1 - &quot;the author...shall have the sole right ... of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending...&quot;Section 2 - &quot;any person .. without the consent of the author...shall forfeit all and every sheet and item.. and pay the sum of fifty cents for every sheet...&quot;Section 6 - &quot;any person .. who shall print ... without consent ... of the author.. shall be liable to suffer and pay ... all damages..&quot;&gt;the final text which focuses on the commercial aspects and not the rights of the authorsI have no idea how you arrived at this statement. I just cited the law which clearly, in every section, enumerates authors rights. Care to cite this &quot;final text&quot; which does not?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Copyright_Act_of_1790" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Copyright_Act_of_1790</a>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.copyright.gov&#x2F;history&#x2F;1790act.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.copyright.gov&#x2F;history&#x2F;1790act.pdf</a>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eduscapes.com&#x2F;bookhistory&#x2F;intellectualproperty&#x2F;4.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;eduscapes.com&#x2F;bookhistory&#x2F;intellectualproperty&#x2F;4.htm</a>[4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalcommons.law.scu.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?article=1111&amp;context=facpubs" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalcommons.law.scu.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?articl...</a>

Using Wikipedia as an authoritative source is actively discourage by Wikipedia project itself and by basically every university and research body in existence.The Early Developments section you talk about is about the concept of copyright as it exist today, rather than the history of copyright law as it was made. The French law, while tangential, followed a different path and focus heavily on the concept of moral right, concept which does not explicitly exist in the US copyright law. US law focused instead on statutory monopolies, and loosely match that of the French commercial right that authors was granted. Authors moral rights, as the existed in French copyright law, was instead weakly incorporated into libel laws.You claim that the US copyright law was started by authors guild, but three states had already enacted copyright statutes prior to the Continental Congress resolution. Where is your evidence that author protection was the intention behind the law makers of the time, which goes in rather stark contrast to every other aspect and the final text which focuses on the commercial aspects and not the rights of the authors. If the US copyright law was derrived from the French law, why is there no concept of &quot;authors moral right&quot; as there is in many EU countries to this day?

&quot;That story leaves out significant details, and his description of the reason is wrong. He leaves out significant prior sources and reasons, to the point your statement &quot;It was not created to help artists or whoever&quot; is simply wrong.
&quot;If you want to point out details, i&#x27;m sure Karl will correct it.&quot;Wikipedia provides a far better history with extensive sources [1]. Note for example the section &quot;Early Developments&quot; where they list precursors to anything in your source as having significant components of individual and author rights.
&quot;These citations are, honestly, mostly BS. Read the early documents yourself, and you&#x27;ll see they pretty much make it up as they go along.&quot;Note also in the US copyright law was started by author guilds wanting author protection, and the first federal copyright act in 1790 was about protection for authors, not for printers.&quot;This is kind of irrelevant to why copyright law came to be, since by then it was already a thing, and part of the entire point is that by then, authors and others had started trying to convince others that it was needed for protectionist reasons, claiming that history also felt a need to be protectionist, when this is completely inaccurate.

It was a reply to DannyBee&#x27;s post claiming copyright &quot;was not created to help artists or whoever&quot;. It starts with &quot;This is 100% inaccurate&quot; which is why I began this the same way.I note others have since reposted the same links in reply to DannyBee for the same reason.How it is off topic since it directly addresses that claim?Did it get detached from the parent, removing context?

We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11782568" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11782568</a> and marked it off-topic.

This is 100% inaccurateThat story leaves out significant details, and his description of the reason is wrong. He leaves out significant prior sources and reasons, to the point your statement &quot;It was not created to help artists or whoever&quot; is simply wrong.Wikipedia provides a far better history with extensive sources [1]. Note for example the section &quot;Early Developments&quot; where they list precursors to anything in your source as having significant components of individual and author rights.Note also in the US copyright law was started by author guilds wanting author protection, and the first federal copyright act in 1790 was about protection for authors, not for printers. This was an extension of many states laws that had passed author protections.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_copyright_law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;History_of_copyright_law</a>

I for one would like to have a public digital recording of the actual trial available...

Google copies API from Oracle, yet I still have to come up with my own solutions to get a job at Google?
Fuckin&#x27; Google.

While it is unpopular among most HN readers that APIs be found to fall under copyright, I don&#x27;t see how it affects software interoperatability in the long term.It seems to me that all that this necessitates is for software publishers to include an open license for their APIs, or to release it into the public domain.In fact, it might even be beneficial, since companies can license different APIs to different customers, and have additional legal force prohibiting the use of APIs that are unofficial or unauthorized to them.

Is it just me, or is this result the worst of both worlds (for the you-and-me&#x27;s of the world, rather than billion dollar corporates)?Had APIs been found not to be copyrightable, that would have been great and opened up the development ecosystem for us to use and adapt each other&#x27;s APIs.Had it been clear that no this sort of thing wasn&#x27;t allowed then small developers would have had protection that they could publish their APIs without fear of a deep-pocketed competitor saying &quot;thanks, we&#x27;re going to muscle you out of the market, using your own design to do it, and ignoring any of that GPL nonsense you&#x27;ve licensed it licensed under, we&#x27;re just having your API as our own thanks&quot;. Not an open world, but at least everyone would be on a level field.But a &quot;fair use&quot; finding of fact sets no precedent for anything else, gives no protection for the ordinary developer, and essentially means &quot;it turns out you can do this if you&#x27;re big enough to afford to pay high-tier lawyers for six years&quot;. (ie, BigCorp can copy APIs with impunity, but you can&#x27;t)

Oracle had already a big bet on Java before they bough Sun.Many of the Oracle-hate group aren&#x27;t aware of the NC Computer and the JavaStation, or that already in 2000 most of the Oracle GUI tools were Java based.So on one hand they have lots of interest in Java and have been better than Sun in its last years, but they also have not been handling JEE, JavaFX and mobile support on iOS and WP that well.Also many of the nice goodies in language evolution have been postponed for Java 10 (AOT, value types, JNI replacement).Being too old at this game I have the same feelings that Java might follow Clipper or Delphi footsteps, if Oracle looses interest in the tech stack and no one picks it up, regardless how ingrained Java is nowadays.IBM is not only looking at Swift, they also have made J9 modular as a framework for implementing language runtimes.

Considering IBM&#x2F;SAP are vowing to bring Swift to masses on servers and clients. Apple&#x2F;MS dropped Java quite a while back. I do not see any big vendor with serious money to pick Java development. Redhat is there but I doubt they will when they might be looking to push Ceylon.Of course it is hypothetical as I absolutely do not think Oracle will consider doing such thing.

If Oracle decides to drop Java development, I wonder who will bother to pick it up.Surely not Google, if they hadn&#x27;t bothered the first time around.

Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour