Did anyone here bother to check the bio's of the officials listed on the amicus brief? If so, you'd discover that the many (maybe most, I didn't count) were holdovers from previous administrations. But, conspiracy theories are fun, I guess.
Given the bipartisan history of the lawyers for the Copyright Office and the DOJ, one possibility is that they are basing the amicus on their interpretation of the Copyright Act and related legal precedents. My preference would be that public interface part of API's would be public domain. But that's a preference, not a legal opinion.
The problem with this case is that the legally correct thing is that Oracle wins. The most desirable practical outcome is that they lose.
Copyright protects creative works. It's not clear why an API wouldn't be a creative work. Oracle's lawyers argue that it is a creative work, because different people can come up with very different designs to solve the same problem, that API design is a skilled and creative process. They're right.
The tech industry has always been in an unstable situation with respect to this consensual interpretation that APIs are facts and not creative works. That's convenient for many people, but tricky to legally support. The correct solution to this problem is an exemption in copyright law for APIs. Given no such exemption exists, why should Oracle not win this case? The judges are meant to rule on law as it is, not what it should be.
This is the absolute reason why Dart, Flutter and Fuchsia exist. You can now imagine that if a loss from Google in this lawsuit were to happen, it would mean royalties in the billions for Oracle which Google won't pay for, or at least for a long time for Android.
So an option is to migrate the Android ecosystem onto Fuchsia to rid of the Oracle royalty fees and own the ecosystem without anyone else looking to sue you for the tech you're using if you created it.
How is Fuchsia relevant to Java API Oracle is chasing them for? Google's back up plan is Kotlin anyway; they can push new version of API that completely severs backward compatibility while providing some library for "legacy app API translation".
IMO there's two ways to read this: either A) this is a baldly transparent attempt to "own the libs" and punish a company that the administration sees as a threat or B) they are too incompetent to understand the technical nuances of the case and are essentially morons. Maybe both? This administration can't be thrown out on their collective asses fast enough...
Both. 50 years of people cynically saying "all politicians are crooks". And now we have legitimate sleazeballs running the country and nobody believes it.
On the one hand, Google is huge and needs competition. On the other hand: not this way. Antitrust and monopoly laws exist for a reason, but if you look at telephones in the 80's and microsoft & intel in the 90's, better lawyers get you around that.
We need trustbusters with teeth. Especially for tech. I wish the EFF was 100x larger.
Respectfully, ( that's a cool name ) but I think you're missing the point here by reducing it to this bipolar conflict between politically insecure acting out and idiocy. I think it's a much cooler and bigger picture.
I think the case is actually very interesting, and not clear cut. It's going to be interesting to find out what the law means as applied to software in this way. I think it's fascinating. A real test between the 'old power' of the law, and the 'new power' of software, I think seeing this play out and considering the implications is incredibly interesting, and as tech people, we're the best placed to enjoy how interesting is.
All the shrill rhetoric of both sides and press aside, I think it's a very significant case even if they weren't massive companies (...tho maybe it couldn't have come this far if the companies hadn't been able to afford it).
In a similar, but less glamorous vein was the LinkedIn vs somebody data scraping case, the outcome of which was very interesting and meaningful. Anyway, I hope people can appreciate the significance of the case without dismissing or simplifying it in this shrill, childish way, and can think about the software implications, which are probably going to be very interesting.
I mean when it's all done we'll probably get to know where we all stand more clearly with software, licensing, re-use and so on, and probably new opportunities we don't see clearly now will become possible because of how the law is figured regarding this. I think that's fascinating, and has nothing to do with idiocy or politics.
If Oracle wins it cements monopoly control of the computing ecosystem. Each megacorp will have their own API moat around their business. LEGO will be stoked.
I know Trump is a politician, but he seems to focus on the culture war and Twitter, not high level corporate battles the masses rarely pay attention to.
If one observes Trump presidency, Trump amplified previous admin policy rather than changed direction. If I have to bet a $1000 dollars on this - the previous administration has similar policy but much tamer version of it.
Trump doing this for Larry Ellison doing a fund raiser for him, is simplistic mid-manager level thinking!
And Windows, whose APIs are from OS/2's Presentation Management layer. And Linux/OS X, many of whose APIs are from Unix! I don't know where Oracle thinks the madness should end, and I don't think they care.
Seems like it would. Which, maybe isn’t a horrible thing, considering it would prevent a company like Amazon from just nuking a vendor like Mongo by cloning their tech and offering it in their PaaS. I would hope that we end up with something more like FRAND rules than conventional copyrights, though.
That was part of it. This article is light on details, but there was one part of the codebase that was copied verbatim. It was the RangeCheck function. Google argued that the function in question was not copywritable, and judge Alsup agreed (after learning how to write code). [1]
It’s unclear to me if the administration only sides with Oracle on this count, or also on reimplementation of APIs, which would have sweeping impacts.
Of course they do. Some might point to Larry Ellison being a major supporter [1] but I think the real motivation is this plays into the narrative that Google is somehow biased against conservatives.
What's interesting about this is Google made two huge mistakes here:
1. According to Google, Sun was fine with their use of Java. If so, why not just put it in writing and get a license? This might've only cost $10 million at the time. Maybe not even that. Even if it was $100 million, it sure looks cheap now;
Remember, Microsoft originally paid for a Java license for IE [2]. And one issue with the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit was that Sun argued forking Java was a breach of contract. Surely this establishes that even if Sun were fine with Android they could try and enforce their IP rights through litigation. So why not enshrine this in a license?
2. Google declined to bid on Sun. I remember when this went down and it seemed risky to let Oracle control Java given how invested Google was in Java at that point. And it should've been clear that Oracle's interest was to leverage Sun's IP to get a slice of Android. Hubris is the only thing I can think of that justified letting this happen.
Jonathan Schwartz was always complaining about Google using SUN's API; they hoped Google would write them a nice fat check and be BFFs but Google decided to be selfish and just used and replaced SUN's tech. I think combination of ex-SUN's people mood and Oracle's lawyer-heavy structure couldn't have led to a different outcome.
Is there any doubt that this is some kind of score-settling? Republicans hate Google. I don't think people inside the SV bubble appreciate just how intense this hatred has become. You know the seething, implacable anger, that bile that comes up out of your stomach when you think of a politician you don't like? A lot of republicans feel that way about Google.
This hatred doesn't come out of nowhere. Google's leaders could have chosen to make the company neutral and tolerant. Instead, they bred a culture of political zealotry from top to bottom. The partisan hatred that the company engendered then leaked into the outside world. The inevitable result? Half of the United States power structure sees Google as an irredeemably biased political project masquerading as a tech company. Is it? Maybe not. But whether this judgement is true doesn't matter --- what matter is the perception that the company allowed its internal activists to create. It was an unforced error, and it's one that I think will become an infamous cautionary tale in the coming decades.
Lesson to corporate leaders: don't encourage politics at work; don't encourage a culture of demonizing a political faction in your home country that wins about half the time; and especially don't hold a company-wide all hands election after this faction wins the election and lament that "we lost".
I’m really skeptical that Republicans know or care about politics in Google’s work culture. I think the only big story to come out about it, the James Damore one, mainly got discussed from a gender angle and most Republican politicians would prefer if that conversation didn’t happen at all.
I'll throw out there that I am a Republican and I don't hate google, I don't hate it with a mindless passion and seeing red at the very mention of its name type of thing.
Honestly the more I am on HN the more I see that hating a company is pretty dumb, I work in a big org that big org has thousands of people making thousands of decisions, nobody has good information and half the people making decisions are incompetent or selfish, or both.
But Google, there are some things I like about it, they have some cool tech and based on what I've seen and heard the Google founders really were interested in making the world a better place to some extent. From a professional perspective I don't like them more lately because it seems like they've turned into Ballmer era M$ than a company interested in good tech and what not.
Now I don't agree with a lot of the vocal minority at Google that wants to turn everything into some sort of political issue and seems to have a blinding hatred of the very word Trump, but I also recognize that's probably a small vocal minority at the company, most of the people at Google are probably just regular people like me, who I might disagree with on politics but are still people, and most of them don't think that everyone who voted for Trump is a closet Neo Nazi that has Swastika hanging in their bedroom, and likewise I assume most of the people at Google aren't some sort of crazed SJW that believes that white people should be enslaved and men should all be denied the right to vote as some sort of mass justice.
My point which I admit wandered is that I think this typecasing of everyone who is X all hate Y or all worship Z is a problem that exceeds anything Trump, the SJWs, the Left the Oompa Loompas or anyone else in politics is doing. I am Republican I have strong opinions but I also recognize there are complicated issues to deal with and anyone who thinks they have the universal answer is either stupid, evil or both.
I admit I could be wrong though it could be that the entire world really is full mostly of people that want everyone who disagrees with them dead in a ditch and believes that they and their opinions are the one true solution to all problems, and are all justice looking to establish their own little totalitarian utopia, but maybe just maybe the majority of people in the world are mostly decent, reasonable, and are looking to do what they can to make the world a slightly better place.
Wouldn't allowing weaponization of APIs via copyrights throw interoperability out of the window?
If this is a part of "Making America Great Again (TM)" campaign, they may be shooting them in the proverbial foot with a BFG9000 breaking down all interoperability in their own tech sector.
Google can still get Trump's endorsement, just write him a check and he'll back Google instead.
Worked for a pardon, Paul Pogue's family just wrote a $200k check and voila, he's pardoned.
The office of president has never been more transparently for sale (ahem, "open for business") and there's absolutely no chance the Senate will perform any accountability here. He could literally murder someone on 7th avenue and there would be 51 votes against conviction.
Sad that it's come to this, but if it's $200k vs an industry-destroying precedent getting set, well... google should suck it up and write the check.
Bribe the president: Definitely not ok. What sort of backwards ass country would allow that sort of thing?
Host fundraiser inviting a couple of your friends to all donate huge amounts to the president: What on earth is the problem? That's completely fair game and I don't see any issues at all.
It seems the US Democracy is morally bankrupt at this point.
I so fear the law suits over every tiny interface.
push, pop,
insert, remove,
put, get, post, delete,
open, close, read, write, send, recv,
begin, end, next, prev,
find, filter, sort, groupby,
start, stop,
sqrt, log, exp.
Synonyms not allowed.
> The Trump administration brief came Wednesday just as Oracle founder Larry Ellison opened a campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump at his southern California estate. Tickets ran as much as $250,000, according to an invitation obtained by the Desert Sun.
Is this the same Trump that doesn't need anyone's money and isn't beholden to anyone? (Sorry for using Breitbart as a reference).
Different appeals concerning different issues. The first one was over the outcome of the first trial.
When the Supreme Court did not step in and overturn CAFC's overturning of the first trial, there was a second trial to determine whether Google's use was fair use. The first trial had not reached that issue.
The trial court said it was, CAFC overturned that. This present appeal is on that issue.
So to reverse the Trump administration's support, everyone should just start tweeting how Trump agrees with Obama and supports the Obama administration's position on this issue...
Oracle winning will not destroy the tech industry, bring innovation to it's knees, or any other crazy apocalyptic concept people have.
It'll mean Google will pay a huge penalty for very willfully stealing Java when they knew they were supposed to license it, and other companies will be a little more explicit about getting licenses squared away. Reliance on open source APIs and platforms will probably go up, and license compliance with terms of GPL and the like will be taken more seriously.
nhebb|6 years ago
Given the bipartisan history of the lawyers for the Copyright Office and the DOJ, one possibility is that they are basing the amicus on their interpretation of the Copyright Act and related legal precedents. My preference would be that public interface part of API's would be public domain. But that's a preference, not a legal opinion.
thu2111|6 years ago
The problem with this case is that the legally correct thing is that Oracle wins. The most desirable practical outcome is that they lose.
Copyright protects creative works. It's not clear why an API wouldn't be a creative work. Oracle's lawyers argue that it is a creative work, because different people can come up with very different designs to solve the same problem, that API design is a skilled and creative process. They're right.
The tech industry has always been in an unstable situation with respect to this consensual interpretation that APIs are facts and not creative works. That's convenient for many people, but tricky to legally support. The correct solution to this problem is an exemption in copyright law for APIs. Given no such exemption exists, why should Oracle not win this case? The judges are meant to rule on law as it is, not what it should be.
rvz|6 years ago
So an option is to migrate the Android ecosystem onto Fuchsia to rid of the Oracle royalty fees and own the ecosystem without anyone else looking to sue you for the tech you're using if you created it.
kllrnohj|6 years ago
The better option is the one Google already did ages ago, switch to OpenJDK: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switch...
Which is GPLv2 w/ classpath exception straight from Oracle. No work for app devs and no work for OEMs.
bitL|6 years ago
Apocryphon|6 years ago
And it's also amusing that the Dart-skeptics now see there is at least one legal reason to justify Google's continued development of Flutter.
throwGuardian|6 years ago
vikingcaffiene|6 years ago
todd3834|6 years ago
Am I understanding this correctly that this has been a bipartisan position?
0xff00ffee|6 years ago
On the one hand, Google is huge and needs competition. On the other hand: not this way. Antitrust and monopoly laws exist for a reason, but if you look at telephones in the 80's and microsoft & intel in the 90's, better lawyers get you around that.
We need trustbusters with teeth. Especially for tech. I wish the EFF was 100x larger.
_ea1k|6 years ago
scarface74|6 years ago
But then when the same government interferes and is on the "wrong" side of popular geek opinion there is an uproar.
zuckluni|6 years ago
I think the case is actually very interesting, and not clear cut. It's going to be interesting to find out what the law means as applied to software in this way. I think it's fascinating. A real test between the 'old power' of the law, and the 'new power' of software, I think seeing this play out and considering the implications is incredibly interesting, and as tech people, we're the best placed to enjoy how interesting is.
All the shrill rhetoric of both sides and press aside, I think it's a very significant case even if they weren't massive companies (...tho maybe it couldn't have come this far if the companies hadn't been able to afford it).
In a similar, but less glamorous vein was the LinkedIn vs somebody data scraping case, the outcome of which was very interesting and meaningful. Anyway, I hope people can appreciate the significance of the case without dismissing or simplifying it in this shrill, childish way, and can think about the software implications, which are probably going to be very interesting.
I mean when it's all done we'll probably get to know where we all stand more clearly with software, licensing, re-use and so on, and probably new opportunities we don't see clearly now will become possible because of how the law is figured regarding this. I think that's fascinating, and has nothing to do with idiocy or politics.
svieira|6 years ago
Both parties don't seem to understand the issue, for what it's worth.
cwperkins|6 years ago
I haven’t been following the case, but please let me know why you have reached the conclusions that you have.
sitkack|6 years ago
raincom|6 years ago
nostromo|6 years ago
And now they're shocked, shocked, that getting political with your monopolistic companies carries some political risk.
The solution is easy enough -- don't talk about politics at work -- and in particular not if you're the CEO.
mathattack|6 years ago
2) Oracle’s Chief Sleazeball recently hosted a fundraiser for Trump.
rdudek|6 years ago
mattkevan|6 years ago
https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/12/21135722/larry-ellison-...
Edit: Beat me to it!
zeruch|6 years ago
[deleted]
Pigo|6 years ago
sremani|6 years ago
Trump doing this for Larry Ellison doing a fund raiser for him, is simplistic mid-manager level thinking!
seren|6 years ago
CobrastanJorji|6 years ago
deathanatos|6 years ago
burlesona|6 years ago
737min|6 years ago
tanilama|6 years ago
This might limit someone else's to reimplement the language's own specs? Something like LLVM will be forbidden in this case?
And Web is a complete mess, if CSS also an API? Are different JS engines will be allowed to be implemented later?
chubot|6 years ago
Also SMB? Although I think that's done at the protocol layer and not the C API layer (?)
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
tus88|6 years ago
What? Wasn't it about APIs not code?
ViViDboarder|6 years ago
It’s unclear to me if the administration only sides with Oracle on this count, or also on reimplementation of APIs, which would have sweeping impacts.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
mint2|6 years ago
jVinc|6 years ago
Reality: Yes, Oracle is openly bribing the president to get the administration to push their agenda.
cletus|6 years ago
What's interesting about this is Google made two huge mistakes here:
1. According to Google, Sun was fine with their use of Java. If so, why not just put it in writing and get a license? This might've only cost $10 million at the time. Maybe not even that. Even if it was $100 million, it sure looks cheap now;
Remember, Microsoft originally paid for a Java license for IE [2]. And one issue with the Sun-Microsoft lawsuit was that Sun argued forking Java was a breach of contract. Surely this establishes that even if Sun were fine with Android they could try and enforce their IP rights through litigation. So why not enshrine this in a license?
2. Google declined to bid on Sun. I remember when this went down and it seemed risky to let Oracle control Java given how invested Google was in Java at that point. And it should've been clear that Oracle's interest was to leverage Sun's IP to get a slice of Android. Hubris is the only thing I can think of that justified letting this happen.
[1]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/oracle-employees-call-on-l...
[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-seeks-35-million-in-java-suit/
bitL|6 years ago
mips_avatar|6 years ago
ratsmack|6 years ago
quotemstr|6 years ago
This hatred doesn't come out of nowhere. Google's leaders could have chosen to make the company neutral and tolerant. Instead, they bred a culture of political zealotry from top to bottom. The partisan hatred that the company engendered then leaked into the outside world. The inevitable result? Half of the United States power structure sees Google as an irredeemably biased political project masquerading as a tech company. Is it? Maybe not. But whether this judgement is true doesn't matter --- what matter is the perception that the company allowed its internal activists to create. It was an unforced error, and it's one that I think will become an infamous cautionary tale in the coming decades.
Lesson to corporate leaders: don't encourage politics at work; don't encourage a culture of demonizing a political faction in your home country that wins about half the time; and especially don't hold a company-wide all hands election after this faction wins the election and lament that "we lost".
djannzjkzxn|6 years ago
hpoe|6 years ago
Honestly the more I am on HN the more I see that hating a company is pretty dumb, I work in a big org that big org has thousands of people making thousands of decisions, nobody has good information and half the people making decisions are incompetent or selfish, or both.
But Google, there are some things I like about it, they have some cool tech and based on what I've seen and heard the Google founders really were interested in making the world a better place to some extent. From a professional perspective I don't like them more lately because it seems like they've turned into Ballmer era M$ than a company interested in good tech and what not.
Now I don't agree with a lot of the vocal minority at Google that wants to turn everything into some sort of political issue and seems to have a blinding hatred of the very word Trump, but I also recognize that's probably a small vocal minority at the company, most of the people at Google are probably just regular people like me, who I might disagree with on politics but are still people, and most of them don't think that everyone who voted for Trump is a closet Neo Nazi that has Swastika hanging in their bedroom, and likewise I assume most of the people at Google aren't some sort of crazed SJW that believes that white people should be enslaved and men should all be denied the right to vote as some sort of mass justice.
My point which I admit wandered is that I think this typecasing of everyone who is X all hate Y or all worship Z is a problem that exceeds anything Trump, the SJWs, the Left the Oompa Loompas or anyone else in politics is doing. I am Republican I have strong opinions but I also recognize there are complicated issues to deal with and anyone who thinks they have the universal answer is either stupid, evil or both.
I admit I could be wrong though it could be that the entire world really is full mostly of people that want everyone who disagrees with them dead in a ditch and believes that they and their opinions are the one true solution to all problems, and are all justice looking to establish their own little totalitarian utopia, but maybe just maybe the majority of people in the world are mostly decent, reasonable, and are looking to do what they can to make the world a slightly better place.
QUFB|6 years ago
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623
bayindirh|6 years ago
If this is a part of "Making America Great Again (TM)" campaign, they may be shooting them in the proverbial foot with a BFG9000 breaking down all interoperability in their own tech sector.
kyrra|6 years ago
TLDR: Oracle has a lobbyist (who was on Trump's transition team) that has gotten the ear of the Whitehouse and been pushing against Amazon and Google.
paulmd|6 years ago
Worked for a pardon, Paul Pogue's family just wrote a $200k check and voila, he's pardoned.
The office of president has never been more transparently for sale (ahem, "open for business") and there's absolutely no chance the Senate will perform any accountability here. He could literally murder someone on 7th avenue and there would be 51 votes against conviction.
Sad that it's come to this, but if it's $200k vs an industry-destroying precedent getting set, well... google should suck it up and write the check.
floppiplopp|6 years ago
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/20/oracle_trump_google...
jVinc|6 years ago
Host fundraiser inviting a couple of your friends to all donate huge amounts to the president: What on earth is the problem? That's completely fair game and I don't see any issues at all.
It seems the US Democracy is morally bankrupt at this point.
jbritton|6 years ago
choward|6 years ago
Is this the same Trump that doesn't need anyone's money and isn't beholden to anyone? (Sorry for using Breitbart as a reference).
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/06/16/peak-trump-i-d...
TehCorwiz|6 years ago
[deleted]
PHGamer|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago
It seems the Trump administration position is not really all that different than the previous administrations.
tzs|6 years ago
When the Supreme Court did not step in and overturn CAFC's overturning of the first trial, there was a second trial to determine whether Google's use was fair use. The first trial had not reached that issue.
The trial court said it was, CAFC overturned that. This present appeal is on that issue.
jrs235|6 years ago
gdsdfe|6 years ago
ur-whale|6 years ago
[deleted]
voxl|6 years ago
[deleted]
AlleyTrotter|6 years ago
DarknessFalls|6 years ago
benignslime|6 years ago
[deleted]
bediger4000|6 years ago
user00012-ab|6 years ago
gnulinux|6 years ago
ocdtrekkie|6 years ago
It'll mean Google will pay a huge penalty for very willfully stealing Java when they knew they were supposed to license it, and other companies will be a little more explicit about getting licenses squared away. Reliance on open source APIs and platforms will probably go up, and license compliance with terms of GPL and the like will be taken more seriously.
just_myles|6 years ago