In my own mind, when CentOS died Oracle was saying you should move to &quot;Oracle Unbreakable Linux&quot;... which is a downstream clone of RHEL, just like CentOS was. Just one example of the hypocrisy.

I had the opportunity once to talk to an IP lawyer for Oracle and brought this up. I specifically brought up the S3 compatibility of their cloud storage among other instances.His reply was “without admitting anything specific, how do you know we haven’t purchased private licenses for anything you just mentioned?”

I&#x27;d really like it if we could kill Oracle somehow. They are easily the worst player in the technology industry.

Yep. This case was an existential threat to multitudes of industries and the assumptions they were built on.The weird thing is it would of hurt Oracle as much as anyone. I have no clue how anyone w&#x2F;any technical merit didn&#x27;t understand that this was a footgun of the largest possible magnitude for them.

After a restructuring, Google is an LLC owned by Alphabet Inc. (the publicly listed organization).

In the US, the Supreme Court is the static const readonly final. It&#x27;s over. There is literally no route of appeal or any way Oracle can keep this case going without a whole new lawsuit. The Supreme Court can elect to make a ruling and then send it back to a smaller court _if they choose_ for final assessment, but they did not do that here, making this ruling definitive.

IANAL, but I believe what the US Supreme Court says is final.  There isn&#x27;t any appellate court for the highest court in the land.

Generally, the Supreme Court finds narrowly on a specific point of friction in the case of a lesser court, answers the question, and kicks it back to that court, as a final answer for that very specific thing.The point in this case was, can Oracle overturn the &quot;phone books cannot be Copyrighted&quot; concept baked into tech law by the IBM v Compaq BIOS case. Seems the Supreme Court finally told Oracle the collection of method signatures from the Java base API are, indeed, a phone book.

A jury&#x27;s findings are final only in determining the facts of the case. The actual legal implications of those facts can still be appealed, reviewed, and modified.

I think the question about overturning the jury is directly addressed in the linked PDF, whose Syllabus is surprisingly easy to read:&gt; Re- viewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of un- derlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This approach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense.I&#x27;m not a lawyer so I don&#x27;t know exactly what this means, other than the SCOTUS saying that it can override the jury decision.

The jury is final on questions of fact. On questions of law the appellate and supreme courts can overrule the trial court.

You understand correctly. The jury&#x27;s decision isn&#x27;t final (and I thought this was ruled on by a judge directly, instead of a jury, but I could be wrong). You can appeal pretty much any case to a higher court. I don&#x27;t know the order, but it&#x27;s not uncommon for cases to appeal to a higher court several times. I.e. a verdict is rendered in a county court; you don&#x27;t like it, so you appeal to the state court. State court still doesn&#x27;t give the decision you want, so you appeal to the Supreme Court.It&#x27;s worth noting that the higher court can reject your appeal. You&#x27;re not entitled to be seen by the higher court, and if you can&#x27;t come up with good grounds for why the lower court was wrong, the appeal will be rejected. The Supreme Court rejects a fair number of appeals (I think the majority of cases).This is final though. There is no higher court than the Supreme Court to appeal to. At this point, the only reason it would change is if the laws change, or the Supreme Court reverses their decision later. It&#x27;s extremely rare that they whole-hog reverse a precedent that they set, though.

The latter. Once the Supreme Court rules, that is the law of the land, unless Congress&#x2F;President pass a new law substantially changing things, which could then have challenges go back through the judicial process.

I didn&#x27;t understand that either, but I found a good explanation on page 2:&quot;The fair use question is a mixed question of fact and law. Reviewing courts should appropriately defer to the jury’s findings of underlying facts, but the ultimate question whether those facts amount to a fair use is a legal question for judges to decide de novo. This approach does not violate the Seventh Amendment’s prohibition on courts reexamining facts tried by a jury, because the ultimate question here is one of law, not fact. The “right of trial by jury” does not include the right to have a jury resolve a fair use defense.&quot;

They could file a new lawsuit but this specific complaint is effectively over.Considering that the votes were not close, I don’t think Oracle would try again. Likely they will pursue a substantially different strategy to try and extort Google.

Realistically, both Google and Oracle are 800lb gorillas and the battle will continue via lobbying legistlators, if not court appeals. It&#x27;s very hard to believe Oracle would just keel over and give up.

As others has said elsewhere, the jury rules on facts and judges rules on law. SCOTUS are judges. Under one interpretation of law, the most recent jury findings of fact held that Google infringed.SCOTUS altered the interpretation of the law, thus removing the legal justification for why the jury found infringement. Since they did not alter any findings of fact (they did not need to) this ruling is legally fine.A jury can say you definitely did X, that court&#x27;s judge can say X is illegal, and SCOTUS can then declare X is legal so it doesn&#x27;t matter anymore if you did X.

I&#x27;m unfamiliar with the legal system (judicial system?). 
I had thought that the jury&#x27;s findings were final. 
Am I understanding correctly that the case still went to the Supreme Court of the US, and now that court finds in favor of Google.What happens after this, more appeals or is this like a proper static const readonly final?

Edit: Heh, yep.  I was blind to it, fixed, thank you!

Federal Circuit, not Federal Court, just to clarify.

As both that thread title and the Supreme Court opinion say, the jury found in favour of Google.They were then overruled by the Federal Court, which has now in turn been overruled by the Supremes.

The HN discussion from 2016 (Jury finds for Google): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11781053" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11781053</a>From 2018 (Oracle revives matter via appeal): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16688521" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16688521</a>Edit: Fixed, had written &quot;Jury finds for Oracle&quot;, which was NOT what happened in 2016. Argh.

&gt; This is a large scale defeat of the GPL and dual licensingCan you elaborate on that? What does this have to do with those thing?

On the other hand, it&#x27;s the sort of ruling that could make companies less skittish about using GPL software.

I don&#x27;t see how this case has anything to do with GPL.

This is a large scale defeat of the GPL and dual licensing, so I&#x27;m not sure how this could be anything but a sad day for sustainable open source development.If you&#x27;re big enough and have enough lawyers, there&#x27;s no reason to license software you want to build on.

I&#x27;m so relieved. This could have forced such dramatic changes in how we develop software. And any other decision would have been a crippling blow to FLOS software.Now if we only could get the SC to invalidate software patents in general.

Also speaking as a layman, but yes. Fair use has, as one of its four factors, the purpose and character of the use, to which interoperability is of definite relevance. It explains -why- the API was reused, even if the internals are entirely different. Not because it saved Google work, or there was some sort of competitive edge against Java SE to be gained by doing so.

Yes, reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is one of the things explicitly allowed by laws such as DMCA.

Interoperability does have legal relevance, but because of programmer skills. Part of the fair use analysis turns on the legitimate goal of allowing programmers to use their skills in Java on the new platform.IAAL but IANAIPL and most emphatically IANYL

IANAL: Merger Doctrine is closest thing I&#x27;m aware of.

There&#x27;s already Ninth Circuit precedent in favor of it. For example, Sony tried to sue two commercial PlayStation emulator developers and the Ninth rejected the lawsuit on all counts (and one of those cases is even cited in this opinion).The court has to talk about programmer skills because Android (at least, the versions before they switched to OpenJDK) was not entirely source- or binary-compatible with Java SE programs. In fact, the reason why they couldn&#x27;t license Java SE was that Sun insisted on Android being locked into compatibility in the first place. So this entirely represents an expansion of existing fair use precedent: now, not only does fair use apply to full reimplementations for the sake of interoperability, but also partial reimplementations made for the sake of programmer convenience.

Yes, interoperability is relevant, because it affects the necessity of copying that particular code rather than making one&#x27;s own substitute, which in turn affects fair use.But Google&#x27;s lawyers (inexplicably, in my opinion) failed to talk much about the fact that many Java libraries are interoperable between Android and Oracle Java, leaving the courts to think only in terms of full applications which are not interoperable. Thus the courts have treated this case as if the only benefit to Android&#x27;s reuse of Java was programmer familiarity.Thankfully, Google won anyway, so any defendant in a future case who can make a better interoperability argument will be in an even stronger position.Edit: For example, in the Federal Circuit ruling that the Supreme Court just overruled, they complain: &quot;Indeed, given the record evidence that Google designed Android so that it would not be compatible with the Java platform, or the JVM specifically, we find Google&#x27;s interoperability argument confusing. [..Google] points to no Java apps that either pre-dated or post-dated Android that could run on the Android platform.&quot; [1][1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cafc.uscourts.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;opinions-orders&#x2F;13-1021.Opinion.5-7-2014.1.PDF" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cafc.uscourts.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;opinions-or...</a>

Question from a layman: Does &quot;interoperability&quot; as a concept have any legal relevance here? Like focusing on programmer skills seems kind of beside the point, which is really for two pieces of software to be able to interoperate.

My first manager, when I was a young engineer at Raytheon would like a word.

I suppose it makes sense from the perspective of copyright law, which protects artifacts. After all, one could say the same for quoting from a famous literary work ..&quot;ha now they&#x27;re valuing literature in terms of number of words of prose!&quot;

Now? I&#x27;ve personally heard quantities of code measured in &quot;lines of code&quot; (or, thousands of lines of code-- &quot;K-LOCs&quot;) going back to the mid-90&#x27;s. An acquaintance who worked for IBM in the 70&#x27;s said it dates back at least that far (measuring developer productivity in the &quot;K-LOCs&quot; they produce).

How else do you determine what amount infringes? One of the four factors is &quot;The Amount or Substantiality of the Portion Used&quot;.

Objective measures are better suited to uniform application of justice vs subjective ones.

I&#x27;m actually ok with that metric in this case as it&#x27;s easy for judges to understand and it&#x27;s actually a good proxy.

Number of lines is actually a pretty good (though imperfect) measure of how difficult a code base is to work with, which is why many developers are delighted by the opportunity to delete code.

LoC is an old and classic software size metric. It&#x27;s not perfect, but not completely useless either.

It is fascinating that code is now being measured quantitatively. Number of &quot;lines of code&quot;.

I can recommend focusing on Justice Thomas&#x27; dissent, which contains a section related to this topic. I believe Justice Thomas agrees with your assessment, and he raises concern that the SCOTUS has essentially made APIs practically uncopyrightable (in that they will 100% of the time find that it&#x27;s fair-use to use them). I actually disagree with him, but only in one sub-category: I think a SCOTUS ruling would be harder to predict in a situation where someone 100% copied an API that had no implementation. That removes the mitigating factor of what portion of the work was used.Ironically the most protected APIs may be the ones nobody implements.

if I remember my history correctly Google did not,  Android was purchased by Google by that time the choice to use Java SE as the API was already made

Substantiality was only one factor in the decision. There were lots of others, such as raison d&#x27;être of copyright, &quot;promoting the progress of science and art&quot;. Because allowing copying of APIs is more important to the &quot;progress of science and art&quot; than the economic impact on the creator of the API, APIs are thusly not copyrightable.

It&#x27;s one thing to steal algorithms but for interoperability to remain possible it is necessary for API to remain &quot;fair use&quot;. I can&#x27;t agree with you that this is a bad thing for them to copy Java SE interfaces.

&gt; especially when you point out the code in question was 0.4% of the entire API.Honestly, the fact that it&#x27;s 0.4% is a BS heuristic. What if they spent a year and all they did was refactor the code so that codebase was 1.43 million lines instead of 2.86? Would that mean these lines of code are 2x as powerful?Lines of code is an indicative heuristic, but not a deterministic one.

I&#x27;m glad about this outcome, because I agree the other outcome would have had a devastating effect on software development.I also appreciate this fair use argument, especially when you point out the code in question was 0.4% of the entire API.Still, I&#x27;ll always struggle with the idea that &quot;the amount and substantiality of the portion used&quot; when copying an interface is comparable to copying an implementation. The interface is, intellectually, the substantially heavier, &quot;bigger picture&quot; component of the API than the implementation. In my view they are apples and oranges.So, I&#x27;m glad this was the outcome. But I&#x27;ll always feel like there was something wrong with Googe taking the Java SE interfaces and using them like they did, gratis.

No but it’s okay to copy all the entry names in the encyclopedia and fill in the content yourself

are you clerking for Justice Thomas, perchance?

So if I copy the entire A volume of Encyclopedia Britannica, but leave B-Z alone, I&#x27;m good?

It&#x27;s also good that Breyer wrote this opinion, given that he was one of the two judges who dissented in Eldred v. Ashcroft almost 20 years ago[1]. Lessig called that opinion &quot;perhaps the best opinion [Breyer] has ever written&quot;[2] in his retrospective on the case.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eldred_v._Ashcroft" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eldred_v._Ashcroft</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.legalaffairs.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;March-April-2004&#x2F;story_lessig_marapr04.msp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.legalaffairs.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;March-April-2004&#x2F;story_l...</a>

Maybe it is the same as using a similar plot, but with 0.4% of code lines being the same I think the analogy doesn’t carry through to using a script word for word.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to compare a programming interface, which is more analogous to designing something like the plumbing architecture for a house, to a movie script, which is art. Yes, a well-written API can be considered art, but with the plumbing analogy, a &quot;copy-cat&quot; would just be making sure the same pipes are connected to the toilets in the same positions. What&#x27;s going on under behind the dry-wall wouldn&#x27;t matter.Movie scripts and APIs aren&#x27;t really comparable as you have presented them.

Do you feel like Wine, Linux, or any web browser is also &quot;stealing a platform&quot; from Windows, Unix, or Netscape?

Not a great analogy. People aren&#x27;t looking to make &quot;interoperable movies&quot;. But let&#x27;s play that out for a moment. Would a copy of star wars with different actors, different scenic design, different music be much of a salable product? I don&#x27;t think so.While I think it would be GREAT to see what Nick Nolte (Lucas was considering him) would have done with Han Solo over the wooden Harrison Ford, I&#x27;m not sure I care enough to sit through it all again to find out. Blech.

I think you&#x27;re also ignoring the &quot;transformative&quot; clause written into the fair use doctrine in the US....the extent to which the use is transformative. In the 1994 decision Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music Inc,[13] the U.S. Supreme Court held that when the purpose of the use is transformative ... is more likely to favor fair use.

&gt; This judgment is the equivalent of someone taking a movie script, shooting a new movie out of it without changing a word, and the court declaring this &quot;fair use&quot; of the script.Ethics aside, as a viewer, it&#x27;d be kind of cool if this were a thing. Small-time movie makers might like it too.

I think you missed the rationale for fair use.

Your example is more like rewriting GCC in Rust and then claiming it no longer needs to be GPL. What Google did would be like writing a set of stock superhero character descriptions and then releasing them under a Creative Commons license so that other movie writers could use them in their movies.

Seems appropriate to create a burner account when you are this wrong and you know it. This is why many of us would like an easy ability to block greens.

&gt; &quot;Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as one small part of the considerably greater whole. As part of an interface, the copied lines of code are inextricably bound to other lines of code that are accessed by programmers. Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.&quot;&gt; Sanity prevailed! This judgment could have had devastating consequences and turned software development into a copyright nightmare.This judgment is the equivalent of someone taking a movie script, shooting a new movie out of it without changing a word, and the court declaring this &quot;fair use&quot; of the script.Software development wouldn&#x27;t have turned into a nightmare unless you decide to steal a platform. Which most people don&#x27;t need to do in order to do their work.

I think that&#x27;s always been a threat. If a large business decides to target an area you develop a system for, you&#x27;re basically out of luck unless you have some novel IP that&#x27;s difficult to replicate. You really have to have something niche, patent it, etc. otherwise you just roll the dice that massive entity X doesn&#x27;t steamroll your livelihood out of business.

Happens today, like AWS Elasticache and AWS Aurora.  I do think you&#x27;re right in that it will make those decisions easier.  Particularly for AGPL&#x2F;GPL things.  Now they can be reasonably sure that cloning the end user facing API bit is &quot;fair use&quot;.

Thats what patents are for.  API is like designing your own custom plug to your device.  You can&#x27;t copyright that plug design, you can patent it its novel and new.

&gt;An alternative take, which I&#x27;m sure won&#x27;t be popular, is that now, with an interpretation taken to the extreme, a megаcorporation can basically steal your (let&#x27;s say a small startup&#x27;s) platform (in case you refuse to sell it for ethical or some other reasons), by re-implementing it and investing much more resources which you don&#x27;t have, to make it more attractive to customers.GNU&#x2F;Linux, a free reimplementation of AT&amp;T&#x27;s Unix interfaces, is largely why commercial Unix isn&#x27;t really a thing any more.

An alternative take, which I&#x27;m sure won&#x27;t be popular, is that now, with an interpretation taken to the extreme, a megаcorporation can basically steal your (let&#x27;s say a small startup&#x27;s) platform (in case you refuse to sell it for ethical or some other reasons), by re-implementing it and investing much more resources which you don&#x27;t have, to make it more attractive to customers.I&#x27;m ok with either decision, but, depending on how this precedent going to be interpreted, it could have far reaching consequences, maybe unintentional&#x2F;undesired ones too.

Yes... Sanity prevailed, no thanks at all to SCOracle.

&gt; Also known as compatibility and interoperability.Actually, not really. Both this ruling and the lower courts&#x27; rulings in the case operated under the strange assumption that Android was not interoperable with Oracle Java, leaving programmer familiarity as the only reason Google copied the APIs. For example, in the Federal Circuit ruling that the Supreme Court just overruled, they complain that Google &quot;points to no Java apps that either pre-dated or post-dated Android that could run on the Android platform&quot;. True; but of course third-party libraries often can run on both Android and Oracle Java, and their importance seems to have been lost on everyone involved in the case... including Google&#x27;s own lawyers.Thankfully, Google won anyway, so any defendant in a future case who can make a better interoperability argument will be in an even stronger position.

&gt; Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.Also known as compatibility and interoperability. I&#x27;m so happy to see that judges understand their importance.

The WINE and ReactOS guys must be cheering!

&gt; This judgment could have had devastating consequences and turned software development into a copyright nightmare.It’d sure have made the practice of taking someone else’s API and re-implementing the innards a lot more interesting:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;iaas&#x2F;Content&#x2F;Object&#x2F;Tasks&#x2F;s3compatibleapi.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;iaas&#x2F;Content&#x2F;Object&#x2F;Tasks&#x2F;s3co...</a>

&gt; IP holder companies will become even more common: they will be used to hold copyright to one API and license it out to customersNot after this precedent, which says that APIs are free.What will happen: Intel licensing the i86 instruction set will not be possible from now on, same for ARM.

Wow, that&#x27;s an insanely brilliant evil business plan. And plausible, too.The copyrightability of APIs will have to be determined.

I wouldn&#x27;t celebrate a victory yet. As is often the case, the court&#x27;s choice of tests simply will serve as a blueprint for others on how to avoid themselves being caught in the same kind of result.Based on this court decision, it&#x27;s apparently fair use to lift someone else&#x27;s API and use it to jumpstart programmer familiarity with your product, if the author of the API previously tried to achieve success in that narrowly-construed, retroactively-interpreted exact same market segment and wasn&#x27;t very successful.I see a few things coming out of this. IP holder companies will become even more common: they will be used to hold copyright to one API and license it out to customers -- including independent companies that you would currently recognize as part of the same platform.But because the IP holder does not provide an implementation and therefore does not &#x27;compete&#x27; in a market segment, any unlicensed use of it is necessarily infringing: there&#x27;s no innate functionality with which one can interoperate under the doctrine of fair use.

The word on the street is that is primarily protected by patents, which explicitly protect against from scratch competing implementations, unlike copyright protection which only protects against verbatim copying of the original work.On the plus side though, they only get 20 years of protection. x86-64 in it&#x27;s original form should be up for grabs pretty soon here.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Influence_of_the_IBM_PC_on_the_personal_computer_market" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Influence_of_the_IBM_PC_on_the...</a>

Can&#x27;t this argument be used to copy the x86 interface and avoid paying license fees to either Intel or ARM for the instruction set?

Now the jewelry stores will have to become smaller so that there will be 1-2 jewels per store. When something gets stolen, it&#x27;ll be 50-100%.

More like 10 million pages of books, Reading 10K pages does not mean one stole all the knowledge.

I think this part here is important regarding your interpretation — it‘s not just about loc&gt; Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.

Who is this &quot;Java&quot; you&#x27;re personifying?Perhaps the measurement should have been a count of bytecode instructions rather than lines of code.

&gt; So if Java had just bloated their code and those apis code footprint represented a larger % of the overall they’d be guilty?Under the fair use doctrine, maybe. Fair use in the US is literally about being able to use &quot;limited&quot; parts of a copyrighted work without getting permission from the copyright holder. What is &quot;limited&quot;? It depends, but 0.4% could reasonably be called limited.&gt; It seems to me the judge is saying, “the house was full of 10 tons of jewelry but the robbers only took 10 pounds so that isn’t really stealing lol “Copyright and fair use apply to the creative substance of the work (in your example, the design on the jewelry, perhaps), not to physical instances of it (the actual pieces of jewelry in the house).

Copyright and fair use is a nuanced balance between giving copyright owners the ability to restrict the actions of the rest of society and encouraging the creation of works that will more than balance out the onerous restrictions undertaken. A situation not all of us even agree on.The class of actions classified as fair use describe situations where arguably society can loosen the reigns to substantial benefit to society without destroying the incentive to create.A classic example would be quoting books to discuss them. The free exchange of ideas greatly enriches society while encouraging not replacing readership.Reducing it to an analogy to physical property obscures instead of enlightens because it misses all the ways a copyright is different than a right to physical property.

So if Java had just bloated their code and those apis code footprint represented a larger % of the overall they’d be guilty? Or if Java trimmed a bunch of non essential packages into modules&#x2F;extensions Google would be guiltyIt seems to me the judge is saying, “the house was full of 10 tons of jewelry but the robbers only took 10 pounds so that isn’t really stealing lol “

Thomas lives in a weird alternative universe where logic works differently.  His dissents are always a trip.

What Amazon deal? Did Amazon pay Oracle to license the Java API?

I agree with the majority here, but how is that crazy? One major point in the fair use analysis is that Android (for smartphones) did not directly compete with Java SE (for laptops and desktops). Showing that Android is a viable alternative for other Java uses, and did indeed supplant other Java contracts, seems relevant.

Read Thomas&#x27; dissent, it&#x27;sabsolutely insane. He says how those 11k lines are basically 97.5% of Java&#x27;s entire usefulness, and billions of dollars of value to Oracle from an Amazon deal. Absurdity.

Yeah it sounds like they were being sued over building a compatibility layer. That&#x27;s nuts. Good thing the right decision was made :)

&gt; &quot;Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as one small part of the considerably greater whole. As part of an interface, the copied lines of code are inextricably bound to other lines of code that are accessed by programmers. Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.&quot;Sanity prevailed! This judgment could have had devastating consequences and turned software development into a copyright nightmare.

&gt; computer programs always serve a functional purposeThe Court is apparently not familiar with much of my code :)

&quot;The doctrine of “fair use” is flexible and takes account of changes in technology. Computer programs differ to some extent from many other copyrightable works because computer programs always serve a functional purpose. Because of these differences, fair use has an important role to play for computer programs by providing a context-based check that keeps the copyright monopoly afforded to computer programs within its lawful bounds.&quot;This is EXCELLENT news for anyone in software development. Yay for Fair Use.

I think he&#x27;s just referring to a modern version of Java the language, not ART vs HotSpot. I don&#x27;t think anyone really cares which runtime is running.

I am talking about C2 JIT support and other sota GCs.
ART has an increasingly growing technical debt.
No support for constant dynamic so no support for the upcoming pattern matching. 
No support for sub 1ms GC 
No support for the already available Vector API.
No support for value types. 
No support for generic specialization.
No support for Loom. 
ART is NIH and support with Java and Kotlin will explode into two worlds, the Android obscolete world and the modern, feature complete and optimized world.
ART has custom improvments? Fine that&#x27;s good, now let&#x27;s gradually port them to openjdk (or a light openjdk fork). No custom improvement is gonna outweight the need of interoperability (and the order of magnitude performance improvement from the above features)
ART is an AOT so I wonder if the android team has considered switching to GraalVM instead of hotspot, the transition might be easier.
Please Google, it&#x27;s time to show technical excellence.

They are using a modern JDK on Android. The standard library is literally OpenJDK, and the runtime is the excellent ART JVM, which has super-fast GC and tons of mobile-specific optimizations (like zygote space support and switching to a different GC when the app goes into the background). IMHO, you really don&#x27;t want HotSpot on mobile. ART is good work.

Now can they please use a modern jdk on Android? It&#x27;s about time

This made me wonder what gender &#x27;apocalypse&#x27; has in French (feminine, it seems - la petit apocalypse),

I doubt that it&#x27;s a lot of money for these companies.

And it&#x27;s kinda nice to see it come to an end. I wonder if both google and oracle are looking at the bills from their lawyers and thinking about it like the destruction at the somme.It&#x27;s great for software, it&#x27;ll be an interesting documentary someday. And congratulations to all the lawyers for making a ton of money.

I’m just grateful this decision didn’t come out 4 months ago. It would’ve gone the way of 2020, somehow.

Oh, I forgot this little apocalypse was hanging over our heads. It&#x27;s good to see some sanity.

Which, for now, is the global hegemon in software and tech at large. Any US court decision is extremely important to the whole industry.

US copyright law and interpretation tends to get exported through trade deals and other forms of political and economic pressure.

Did Oracle also sue Google in other countries outside of the US? To my knowledge we didn&#x27;t need any saving in this respect in my country.

Doesn&#x27;t matter, as GDPR showed having something that&#x27;s troublesome to sell or distribute in certain (critical) markets is a huge, massive roadblock for most companies. Software patents are worth s*t in the EU, but still we had to endure year of hassle when installing MP3s and such on Linux due to most distros having to also comply with the US market.

I agree with the parent.  Patent trolls aren&#x27;t tied to patents because of some love for patents specifically, but because the legal structure allows for the most misuse.  They would gladly add another tool to their belt given the chance, as we saw from this case with most of the bad copyright opinions coming from the CAFC, ie. the patent appeals court that&#x27;s currently stuffed with IP maximalists.

s&#x2F;patent trolls&#x2F;copyright trolls&#x2F;This case involved copyright, not patents. Copyrights are separate from patents.

Should we also get rid of all of GNU&#x27;s hostile rewrites?

&gt; Or prevent them from eradicating competing or even original projects by doing hostile rewrites or forks?Wouldn&#x27;t this directly contravene the findings in this case?

Why would you prevent someone from writing whatever code they want, as long as it is FOSS? That&#x27;s hypocritical, considering that doing whatever you want with the code is one of GNU&#x27;s main tenets (&quot;free as in freedom&quot;)

Good, now can we get a ruling that prevents Google, RedHat, Microsoft and others from wrecking FLOSS projects with their stifling influence?Or prevent them from eradicating competing or even original projects by doing hostile rewrites or forks?

If this wasn&#x27;t fair use, nothing of any substantial value could be considered fair use.

It definitely sends a message. And the stakes were so high that the message is know very loud and clear, too.

&gt; whether this particular case constitutes fair useThe English common law system relies heavily upon judicial precedent. A ruling in this particular case that the copying of an API constitutes fair use will inform decisions in future cases of similar copying.

Justice Thomas clarifies why this case has wide-reaching impact in his dissent.&quot;Congress rejected categorical distinctions between declaring and implementing code. But the majority creates just such a distinction. The result of this distorting analysis is an opinion that makes it difficult to imagine any circumstance in which declaring code will remain protected by copyright.&quot;I concur with Thomas (not in the connotation - he thinks this is a bad thing, I do not - but in the denotation). This ruling is such strong precedent that almost any API cannot be bound by copyright that no company is going to be willing to spend the money to raise the question.

Why? It wasn’t about whether APIs are under copyright (they are), but whether this particular case constitutes fair use. I think the effect of this decision was way overblown.

It also saved open source software which reimplements proprietary API:s

I’d make the case that it instead saved closed source coding.Open source code is still usually copyrighted. Nobody would trust closed languages and APIs unless they paid a fortune for them while open source with a grant would be safe to use.

I assume this means that Amazon can ignore the Elastic and Mongo licenses when building compatible implementations?

I don&#x27;t know about that. The issue at hand there isn&#x27;t implementation of APIs, it&#x27;s using an existing API (run on existing infrastructure) in a way that the social media company does not approve of. Isn&#x27;t that more an issue of unauthorized access than of copyright?

It is going to open a big door for people who reimplement APIs.In particular, social-media aggregators (one app to display your Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc.) may have new protections.

To be pedantic, this part of the case is about copyright law, not patent.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...</a>.The first phase of the case lasted from 2010 to 2015. Oracle successfully established that APIs are copyrightable, but their claims of patent infringement were rejected. Google petitioned the Supreme Court in October 2014 to review the case, but this was denied. A second petition by Google in January 2019 included the judgement that APIs are copyrightable. The Supreme Court agreed to review this part of the judgment in November 2019.To the degree that SCOTUS has found that an API can be copyrighted, there is still room for copyright trolls to operate.

This is one of the most important legal decisions in the history of software. The US Supreme Court has basically just saved the whole software industry (and FOSS projects) from being wrecked by patent trolls.

I don&#x27;t know why people are acting like this is some victory of open sourceI don&#x27;t know that anybody is saying that Google did anything specifically Good or Just or Noble or anything. The celebratory aspect is more based on all the Bad Things that would have happened in the future if this decision had come down in favor of Oracle.

That&#x27;s a thorough miss-understanding and misrepresentation of the situation. It also has nothing to do with open source specifically.Google never promoted Dalvik as being a licensed Java VM implementation and never claimed it was a compatible Java runtime. The license was for logos and trademarks. As long as they didn&#x27;t use those logos and trademarks, there&#x27;s no violation of the license for those things. The API case is based on copyright, not trademarks or licenses so is a separate issue.This is why Microsoft could lose their dispute with Sun over the MSJVM which was a non-compliant JVM implementation, but still come out with J# which was an implementation of the Java language running on .NET.Microsoft licenses the Java trademarks and claimed the MSJVM was an implementation of the Java runtime, while breaking compatibility requirements for the license. Therefore they were in violation of the license. The .NET platform was never claimed to be anything to do with Java, so having Java code run on it in the form of J# was fine. The situation with Google using the Java language running on Dalvik is exactly analogous.

Can you be more specific about the differences your talking about? As far as I&#x27;m aware, Google never added their own features to the language itself. Granted, they were a bit slow to support new versions like Java 8. They also chose not to support libraries like awt, but I wouldn&#x27;t consider those part of the Java language; rather they&#x27;re part of Java SE.

I&#x27;m glad for the verdict but this is such bullshit.Google implemented exactly enough to create the illusion of letting people use their Java talents then dragged their feet with a half broken out-of-date language environment.And they did all this to save money, not some sort of noble rebellion or clever hack.&gt; Sun offered a licensing deal of between US$30 and 50 million. Schmidt said Google would have paid for that license, but they were concerned that Sun had also requested some shared control of Android along with the fee.A pittance for Google but that vague &quot;some control&quot; sounds really bad right? Well fortunately there&#x27;s a history here and we know from past licensing deals (J++) this control is enforcing interoperability with other Java implementation. And of course Oracle spells that out pretty easily:&gt; Oracle states that Sun refused because Google’s intention was essentially to fork Java to a Google version of the language, and to prevent it being inter-operable with other versions, an idea which was “anathema” to the “write once run anywhere” basis of the language.Google got a cheap license and the only stipulation was &quot;don&#x27;t fuck up the Java ecosystem by having your OS run Java-but-not-really&quot; but that was too much for them and exactly what they ended up doing!I don&#x27;t know why people are acting like this is some victory of open source. Maybe a victory for open source, but championed by a greedy corporation that fragmented the Java ecosystem for years.I wish Oracle could have taken another angle here, they deserved damages from Google for this. Google literally pulled a J++ and got away with it.

This appears to be the &quot;money quote&quot;:We reach the conclusion that in this case, where Google
reimplemented a user interface, taking only what was
needed to allow users to put their accrued talents to work
in a new and transformative program, Google’s copying of
the Sun Java API was a fair use of that material as a matter of law.Also, while I hate to just repeat things that have already been said, I feel compelled to say&quot;What a relief!&quot;because this would have been a complete disaster if they had gotten this decision wrong. In fact, I&#x27;m not sure &quot;complete disaster&quot; is a strong enough phrase to reflect what it would have meant for the software industry if this had come down the other way. So getting this looming disaster out of the way is a tremendous relief.

How about in a higher level language?  C program that is all semicolons vs. a book of all semicolons?  Neither computer nor human is any more knowledgeable after reading it.

Yes a NOP is an instruction to do something. It tells the cpu to not change state for a period of time equal to how long it takes to execute the NOP.

&gt; Computer programs differ to some extent from many
other copyrightable works because computer programs always serve a functional purpose.So a computer program instructs processors to do things while books do not necessarily instruct neurons to do things. This seems like a leap. I could write a book with NOP for every word or I could write a program with NOP loops. Are these really instruction to do things? Like so, books do instruct people (aka knowledge).

They didn&#x27;t establish a new test, they applied the existing 4 tests &#x2F; factors and found that they indicated fair use. The first 2 or 3 pages contain a description of the 4 tests and how they were found to apply in this case.

&quot;Held: Google’s copying of the Java SE API, which included only those 
lines of code that were needed to allow programmers to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, was a fair
use of that material as a matter of law.&quot;If the un-italicized is the new test, that&#x27;s probably the most reasonable thing I&#x27;m going to read this month. And it&#x27;s only the 5th.

While Breyer wrote the piece, it was a single majority piece, which means all 6 justices agreed on it.  The other 5 justices and their clerks were all effectively editors on the majority opinion.

A supreme court clerkship is very impressive, but &quot;saved by one of these people&quot; is strong. My understanding is the justices have a conference, stake out their positions, and then the chief assigns cases based on who can attract a majority to their opinion. So Breyer presumably had a rationale that could get at least 4 concurrences in conference. It&#x27;s possible for the other justices to later change their minds based on the actual opinion the chambers produce, but that doesn&#x27;t seem to be the case here. It&#x27;s also possible the case was just assigned based on workload, considering the 6-2 split, almost anyone could have written it.In other words, the clerks do the work of researching and fleshing out the finished opinion, but I don&#x27;t think they have much influence on the rationale used to decide the case. I&#x27;ve heard stories of clerks having to write opinions they personally disagreed with.

UPDATE: based on Wikipedia [1], the &quot;API&quot; was likely saved by one of these people (all likely in their mid-20s!):Emily Barnet, 2020, Yale (2015)Diana Li Kim, 2020, Yale (2017)Arjun Ramamurti, 2020, Yale (2018)Daniel Richardson, 2020, Virginia (2018)Brittany Jones-Record, 2020, Stanford (2016)David Scott Louk, 2020, Yale (2015)Elizabeth B. Deutsch, 2021, Yale (2016)Joel F. Wacks, 2021, Chicago (2018)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_law_clerks_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States_(Seat_2)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_law_clerks_of_the_Supr...</a>

Another way to read that would be that the S3 API isn&#x27;t a substitute for S3, and so another company using the S3 API could be fine so long as they don&#x27;t copy the code for S3 itself?My impression is that this is probably nuanced enough we need to read past the syllabus if we wanted to really unpack the reasoning. I can&#x27;t tell which is the key part from which to make an analogy.

Theoretically, yes. But such companies would also have the ability to argue that their API was fully interoperable with S3, a factor counseling in favor of fair use. Google could have talked about interoperability in this case too, but for some reason didn&#x27;t; see my other comment [1].<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26701488" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26701488</a>

Strictly speaking, yes - this decision, as many other SCOTUS decisions, is tailored to specific case and leaves the other situations to be argued on their own merits. But having definite precedent in the situation where API has been recognized as non-copyrightable both sends signal to the lower courts about where SCOTUS leans, and to the potential plaintiffs about their chances to ultimately prevail. It is not a definite solution for all cases, but it shifts the calculus to the side of &quot;if you sue for copyright infringement about S3 API, it&#x27;d be an uphill battle for you and probability to lose is high&quot;.

&quot;Here the record showed that Google’s new smartphone platform is not a market substitute for Java SE.&quot;Does this mean that companies copying the S3 API as a substitute for S3 are still untested territory?

I believe the parent commenter was highlighting the particular wording of the opinion, rather than the actual decision itself.One could imagine an opinion supporting the same decision with less clear or precise language. As I understand the process, the opinion was frequently reviewed and advised by Breyer, but actually written by one of the clerks.

Acknowledgement of the actual process of drafting opinions like this?

Knowledge of how the justices work.The way that the Court and every one of the justices work is that he&#x2F;she will draft out with the clerks the broad principles and approach that he&#x2F;she wishes the decision to be crafted around. Which cases influence the precedent, which regulations take what role in the decision, what issues to &quot;turn&quot; the case on, etc.It&#x27;s the job of the clerks then to go research, summarize, and create the bulk of justice&#x27;s position based on knowledge of the details. They (justice + clerks) then review and talk about the evolving draft opinion several times over the course of months, circulating drafts to the other justices (and their clerks) as well. And note, most of the facts&#x2F;issues already came up in the lower courts cases and rulings, so there has already been some fair surfacing of the details of the dispute (and what other judges believe the important issues to be) as it made its way through the system.The justices have many opinions per term to do this for, and you can be very sure that while the &quot;authoring&quot; justice has been briefed on (and very well has tested the ideas with the clerks in detail), the summary of how APIs work and their legal status is not based on the justice him&#x2F;herself wading through license agreements and &quot;figuring out&quot; the structure of the code or its legal status.So, that is not to say that the justices are ignorant of the details (far from it), but the level of detail needed to form the groundwork of the opinion is heavily shouldered and created by the law clerks. But the main conclusions of the opinion are definitely of the justice him&#x2F;herself (with input from the clerks).-- By the way, the clerks (you may not realize) already have had a role in getting the case even to be heard before the Supreme Court, in briefing and summarizing the underlying appealed case on why it should be ripe for a decision, so they already many of the issues at stake and how to think about them.Maybe think of it like a software engineering manager and the individual developer. The manager can lay out the principles by which a certain piece of code is to be written, and the capable developer will identify all the issues, test cases, etc., and they will review it together at various stages. You would not say that either could have done it without the other. It&#x27;s kind of like that (when software engineering works like it should).

Why do you think Breyer and the other assenting justices wouldn&#x27;t be able to come to this kind of decision without a clerk taking the lead?

The lower courts have been frankly awful about refusing to acknowledge the rulings that SCOTUS has been handing down about software and technology in general. For example Alice Corp v CLS Bank International basically put an end to the validity of &quot;[generic idea or business method], but on a computer&quot; patents and the lower courts have basically said &quot;haha ok great but we&#x27;re not doing it&quot;, continuing to rule on &quot;on a computer&quot; patents as if they were valid, and with the patent office continuing to issue such patents.Obviously this is copyright vs patent law but it goes to establish that there&#x27;s been a big problem with the lower courts on &quot;computer laws&quot;. It&#x27;s a nexus of the problem with jurisdiction-shopping (finding a lower court that wants to keep lots of cases coming in and is willing to pump out questionable decisions to do so) and just the legal system being about 30 years behind the times in general in terms of understanding computers and how innovative a particular idea may be.

&quot;Here the record showed that Google’s new smartphone platform is not a market substitute for Java SE.&quot;Well that nukes it. The courts took how long to identify this precedented principle? It seems like the rest of the opinion is just there to ward off more of this tomfoolery for people that don&#x27;t get it.

It is not publicized which of the Supreme Court clerks helped author an opinion, for definite reasons.What you will likely see is in a couple years, one or two of the clerks start to appear as law professors or judges involved in such cases.

&gt; Which of Breyer&#x27;s clerks drafted this? They clearly understand many tech issues and I hope they find their place on some Federal circuit to herald an era of logic in tech law.Breyer also has a brother who was a District Court judge in the SF Bay Area who&#x27;s undoubtedly had to deal with various tech cases. Not saying there&#x27;s any kind of shared knowledge of tech within the Breyer family but just kind of interesting.

Precedent works by analogy. What matters is not just the outcome of a particular case, but the reasoning. When similar legal questions come up in future cases, lower courts are required to cite this case and follow the same reasoning, to the extent the reasoning applies to the facts of that case. Of course, no two cases have exactly the same facts, and different facts may produce a different outcome. But if a future case is similar enough to this one, the lower court will be expected to compare the two cases and explain why the differences in facts justify a different outcome.No legal question is resolved for sure until it reaches the Supreme Court, but most cases never make it there, instead being resolved by lower courts applying higher courts&#x27; precedents.

How much precedence does this carry for other cases or does each instance of &quot;fair use&quot; need to be evaluated by the Supreme Court before we know if it was legal?

Breyer has actually been writing on these issues for quite some time; see for example his article &quot;The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in Books, Photocopies, and Computer Programs&quot; [0] -- published in the Harvard Law Review in 1970. His overall body of work demonstrates a pretty good understanding of the underlying technical issues, and he has been a reliable ally on the bench in this area.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;1339714?seq=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;1339714?seq=1</a>

Which of Breyer&#x27;s clerks drafted this? They clearly understand many tech issues and I hope they find their place on some Federal circuit to herald an era of logic in tech law.&quot;Google’s limited copying of the API is a transformative use. Google copied only what was needed to allow programmers to work in a different computing environment without discarding a portion of a familiar programming language. Google’s purpose was to create a different task-related system for a different computing environment (smartphones) and to create a platform—the Android platform—that would help achieve and popularize that objective. &quot;...&quot;Here the record showed that Google’s new smartphone platform is not a market substitute for Java SE.&quot;...&quot;Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment. &quot;...&quot;the Court concludes that Google’s copying of the API to reimplement a user interface, taking only what was needed to allow users to put their accrued talents to work in a new and transformative program, constituted a fair use of that material as a matter of law. &quot;

Ah yes. The company that forbids people from benchmarking their database must be a bastion of good engineering.

Oracle is making a lot of innovation in openjdk and graalvm. They have much better engineers than if e.g Google had bought sun.

Sun drove themself into the ground. And at least in the Java world they have been excellent stewards. The platform is moving forward again.

I am glad Oracle didn&#x27;t win.  It seems to me that they bought Sun just to sue Google.  I&#x27;m still bitter over for how they destroyed Sun... it&#x27;s a shame that they didn&#x27;t have a better steward.

I had forgotten about this for quite awhile, given the pace at which these cases operate at.The great sigh of relief I was unexpectedly gifted this morning upon seeing this at #1 was a nice surprise. Very important precedent, good job.

I don’t think it moots the point at all.* Google’s API copying can’t be fair use if they weren’t copyrightable in the first place.* If you do copy an API because of it’s beauty and not for either interoperability with software or interoperability with developers then it seems that you would run afoul of copyright.

True, but it&#x27;s such a strong precedent in favor of copying API&#x27;s being &quot;fair use&quot; that it at least partly moots the more general question of &quot;are API&#x27;s copyrightable in the first place.&quot; I think this was a good decision all in all. AIUI, the SCOTUS try to limit the scope of their decisions as much as possible, to avoid over-generalization.

It was, but SCOTUS declined to rule on it.

Was the question of API copyrightability even raised before the court? I&#x27;d guess Google didn&#x27;t think it was in their interest to go that far.

&quot;(e) The fact that computer programs are primarily functional makes it difficult to apply traditional copyright concepts in that technological world.&quot;So the opinion effectively preserves the status quo in the software industry while sidestepping the question of API copyrightability.

Thanks for pointing that out -- I skipped over that first footnote. On my screen, it&#x27;s on the previous page from the quote I posted (for what it&#x27;s worth).

He addresses this in footnote 1 on the same page, though. &quot;A different company, Sun, created the library. But because Oracle later purchased Sun, for simplicity I refer to both companies as Oracle.&quot;

I was under the impression that a dissent has to be written, even if they all agree in the majority opinion&#x2F;ruling?

Why is it that you aren&#x27;t surprised?

Not surprised at all the Thomas and Alito are in that dissent..

Also from the first page of the dissent: &quot;A different company, Sun, created the library. But because Oracle later purchased Sun, for simplicity I refer to both companies as Oracle.&quot;

I mean, Android was acquired by Google as well.

From the dissent: &quot;In the 1990s, Oracle created a programming language called Java...&quot;Sun Microsystems was acquired in 2010... I guess I should give Thomas the benefit of the doubt that he intended the statement to apply to Oracle&#x27;s owned IP &amp; not be a historical account of the language&#x27;s creation and creators, but this rubbed me the wrong way.

I&#x27;m not sure what Thomas was referring to. What does &quot;create their own declaring code&quot; mean? Did they do some kind of white room implementation where they typed in the contents of a javadoc web site? Did they modify the name of parameters?

Designing an API is a creative work not unlike that of an architect, I see the merit in the dissent pointing out, e.g &quot;there may have been only one way for Google to copy the 
lines of declaring code, but there were innumerable ways 
for Oracle to write them. Certainly, Apple and Microsoft
managed to create their own declaring code.&quot;

Page 44 has Thomas’s dissent with Alito concurring. Worth a read as well, even just to see  the opposing arguments.

&gt; There is no appellate court above the Supreme Court.That is true.&gt; The only way things could change now is if Congress&#x2F;President passed a new lawThat isn&#x27;t true at all; the Supreme Court is free to change the law by itself. Someone could sue over the same question and get a different result overruling this one.

Yes. There is no appellate court above the Supreme Court. The only way things could change now is if Congress&#x2F;President passed a new law, and I don’t think API copyrights are near the top of the list.

IIRC, they lost on the patent portfolio at the very beginning. That&#x27;s how the case went to CAFC instead of the Ninth Circuit--there was a patent argument in the original appeal, which was dropped several years ago. And having already lost on the patent question in the past, any future case can point back to that decision and say &quot;can&#x27;t relitigate this point.&quot;

Time for Oracle to pull out the Sun patent portfolio and start over.

Is this a final judgement? Is it over now?

It&#x27;s not going to do much for a PDF :)

uBlock origin has a convenient font blocker, for what is worth. Saves many kilobytes, and readability.

I don&#x27;t understand why people uses such stupid font style -_-

I am not a lawyer, but I don&#x27;t see why not.Have you ever used code generation as part of software you have built?Is there any reason why generated code could not be copyrighted as part of a larger system?For example, suppose I define a data model for a public-facing API and then generate SDKs in various popular programming languages to interact with the public-facing API.If I were a major corporation that owned such a public-facing API, then I would expect that the generated SDKs would carry the major corporation&#x27;s copyright.edit: Another example of generated code would be the code generated by lexer analyzer generator and parser generator tools such as lex (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lex_(software)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lex_(software)</a>), flex (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Flex_(lexical_analyser_generator)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Flex_(lexical_analyser_generat...</a>), YACC (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Berkeley_Yacc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Berkeley_Yacc</a>), and bison (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;GNU_Bison" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;GNU_Bison</a>).If you create commercial software that includes YACC-generated code, wouldn&#x27;t the generated code be copyrightable?

Sometimes I fantasize about generating methods for creating copyrights, such that you can copyright the process of creating the copyright - for the commmunity, obviously. However, they explicitly forbid that, unfortunately. If only it worked, you could file a claim for anyone that created a copyright to your disliking, given that you probably make strong stance.While I&#x27;m at it, in a similar vein though entirely unrelated, i sometimes think of ways to create jurisprudence in your favor: You try to emulate a situation to your disliking - e.g. aggresive data hoarding - and file suit to yourself, try to argue the arguments that your target would probably file, but just crappy enough that you actually lose. Do this often and stealthy enough and voila, you might have generated enough jurisprudence to actually file your final claim based on your previous &quot;lost&quot; lawsuits. I do think that this actually does happen at times, though.

My understanding is no. Copyright requires human authorship (the case of the monkey selfie found it to be public domain because a monkey did it, e.g.), and code written by a machine is likely to follow similar precedent and be uncopyrightable.

For video and photography, there has to be a human element involved.A fixed, CCTV feed of a beach with a daily sunset is not copyrightable, nor is a non-human using a photo camera.

&gt;Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you&#x27;re generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or melody itself.What would be the difference between a &quot;generated text or melody&quot; you present to copyright, to one you&#x27;ve written yourself?What would be the mark of &quot;automatic generation&quot; that would be used to identify them as such and disqualify them?

Can you copyright generated things? You probably could copyright the way you&#x27;re generating it, but I doubt you have a legal standing about the generated text or melody itself.

Independent copyright when a work was independently created is a thing in most jurisdictions, as copyright covers copying and is not like patents in that regard.However, that would indeed require a ton more work to prove that you did not copy any of the generated work and truly did create yours by yourself.

&gt; Had the ruling gone in Oracle&#x27;s favor I can imagine some greedy company trying to procedurally-generate every API and copyright them allIt would have officially mean businesses and the US governments are locked by vendors and have no right to copy API in order to provide compatibility towards other systems.Making « VendorLocking » legally valid in favor of the vendor.Not gonna lie I was scared by the outcome of that judgement and the catastrophic defense of Google.I’m now relieved !

Had the ruling gone in Oracle&#x27;s favor I can imagine some greedy company trying to procedurally-generate every API and copyright them all similar to this project which tried to copyright all musical melodies:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;life-style&#x2F;gadgets-and-tech&#x2F;news&#x2F;music-copyright-algorithm-lawsuit-damien-riehl-a9364536.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.independent.co.uk&#x2F;life-style&#x2F;gadgets-and-tech&#x2F;ne...</a>In the case of the music project, it was for the protection of the community, but I can imagine such a system being used selfishly for software APIs.

&gt; worth a shot, to throw a few millions (if that?)Teams of high end lawyers over about a decade? Probably at least 10s of millions.

It was definitely more than a few millions. Still might have been worth it but lawyers are expensive.

&gt; as it pursues other extortion schemes using Sun’s Patents.They bought Sun 12 years ago...not much time left to pursue that...

The money goes into lawyers fees.Because of the way this decision went, I’m sure Google considers it a worthy investment and Oracle considers it a temporary setback as it pursues other extortion schemes using Sun’s Patents. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a specific division of lawyers dedicated to finding novel ways of extorting wealth using Patents; this would likely just be one of the cases they were working on.Come to think of it, from Oracles perspective it was definitely worth a shot, to throw a few millions (if that?) with a chance of winning billions.

It was money well spent for Google.  For Oracle, it was money thrown away for nothing but bad PR.

I don&#x27;t know, but it was money well spent and we should thank them for causing this important point of law to be clarified.

Does anyone have a good estimate of what this case cost Oracle and Google, especially in terms of legal fees, and where that money went ultimately?

Great! This could open a very dangerous precedent.Time to end this one now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26692575" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26692575</a>

I kinda doubt Oracle sued for 9 billions damages because Google tarnished Oracle&#x27;s image with their bad Java implementation.

Except that Android is a fkup of “Java” that is so old that repositories have to create an android and a normal version. Kotlin spread into android development pretty much because android java is so bad.That is exactly what was the “damage” Oracle sued for.

&quot;The record also showed that Java SE’s copyright holder would benefit from the reimplementation of its interface into a different market....the jury also heard evidence that Sun foresaw a benefit from the broader use of the Java programming language in a new platform like Android, as it would further expand the network of Java-trained programmers...and because there are two markets at issue, programmers learning the Java language to work in one market (smartphones) are then able to bring those talents to the other market (laptops).&quot;The benefits of reimplementing APIs always flow both ways. I&#x27;m glad SCOTUS recognised this point.

Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use [pdf]