Submitted by “Oracle has claimed that Google derived its Android code from the specifications for ‘hundreds’ of Oracle’s copyrighted Java files, and that at least eight Android files are actually decompiled Oracle object code. Last week, Google asked a federal court to consider dismissing the copyright portion of the patent and copyright infringement suit that Oracle brought against Google and Android last August. But Judge William Alsup rejected Google’s request, following a letter from Oracle strongly defending the copyright claims.” Also – wait, are we already back to A? Didn’t Alsup do the Apple vs. Psystar case?
Was the copyright on the file when Google copied it?
What was the timeline? What is to stop Oracle from copyrighting it afterward?
If it ever existed without a copyright, wouldn’t that make it fare game?
What if it existed in two different places at the same time with different copyrights? What if Google had a choice to copy it from Apache Harmony without a copyright or Sun / Oracle with a copyright, and they chose Apache Harmony?
Its frivilous. Look at that PolicyNodeImpl class…. Its so tiny. If you gave someone the specification for such a class and they coded it up it would look very similar. This doesn’t prove copying. Show me some comments with the same misspellings or something. Even then, for a class so small, copying should be legal, otherwise people would copyright the simplest of methods.
Everything that can be copyrighted is automatically copyrighted the moment it is created. It is virtually impossible for something created in the past 70ish years to not have a copyright on it.
Someone created the work. Oracle claims it is that someone and registered the copyrights. That would be proof it was theirs. How Google acquired the files is irrelevant since any distribution of a copyrighted work is copyright infringement. Even if someone else infringed the copyrights earlier in the chain, Google’s distribution would make them liable as well.
There are legal tests the define whether or not something is expressive enough to deserve copyright protection.
From what I know, you can’t actually copyright API definitions. This is pretty much what SCO tried and failed with by trying to claim that Linux header files contained definitions that existed in their unix header files (of course, as it turned out they didn’t own unix even to begin with). These things are considered facts, and thus can’t be copyrighted, like you can’t copyright league results or a bus time table. This is very likely why Microsoft hasn’t come after Wine. If this holds true then it would invalidate the 51 avi packages Oracle claimed copyright breach on. As for the directly copied files in Oracle’s claim, Google stated that As for the “only two files allegedly containing ‘copied’ code,” Google says they were “created by Google and provided to Oracle for use in open source releases of Java”.
What is true and what is not is something we will have to wait and see.
If that’s actually true the someone (lets hope Ellison) at Oracle will be in deep shit. The words “willfully misleading” springs to mind.
Remember SCO didn’t get to the point of testing the copyright or patents on the APIs etc because Novell invalidated their ownership of the code before it got that far.
Using an API for the purpose of interoperability is generally accepted as “fair use” in the context of copyright law. In general Google wanted programmers to be able to use the syntax and reserved words of Java to write programs for Dalvik, but Dalvik itself is not Java.
A discussion of the concepts involved can be found here:
http://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq
“Fair Use: The fair use doctrine allows users to make unauthorized copies in certain circumstances. Courts have found that reverse engineering for interoperability, for example, can be a fair use.”
There is apparently some legal precedent for this, regardless of the SCO case.
Sega Enterprises v. Accolade
Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix
There are a number of provisos, such as EULAs, trade secret law and the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions that would invalidate a “fair use” defense in some cases, but it is difficult to see how any of those would apply to Google wanting to make Dalvik source code syntax the same as Java. Java syntax is hardly a trade secret, there is no EULA involved, and Dalvik is not Java so anti-circumvention can’t apply (since Java itself hasn’t been copied).
PS: In the SCO case, all of the API file claims were indeed rejected and it was reduced to 300 lines of obscure code somewhere that were left in the case. I think even this was interface code.
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20070828132340846
“Even if the copyrights belonged to SCO, there are less than 300 lines of code at issue in that case in the end, and it’s mostly standard interface code that many believe would be found to have no copyright protection no matter who owns it. That’s 300 lines of code out of more than 6 million lines of code in the Linux kernel.”
I’m pretty sure all of the header files SCO claimed were at issue turned out to be fair use interoperability information, as they are required for anyone wishing to write a POSIX-compliant OS. POSIX is an open standard.
There were no patents involved in the SCO case. Issues such as JFS, RCP and SMP that SCO bought up are IBM’s technology anyway … IBM held the patents.
Edited 2011-02-25 06:26 UTC
Forgetting the absolute frivolity of the lawsuit on Oracle’s part, the source files shown are NOT identical. I see enough differences to keep Google out of hot water here though I would defer my opinion to any legal eagles present.
I will repeat a previous comment I made that Larry Ellison has become the new Darl McBride. Anybody remember him? What a Putz.
Where it says “rejected” as in: “Judge William Alsup rejected Google’s request”, as I understand it that is “rejected without prejudice”. This means, I believe, “rejected for now, you can bring this up again later”.
AFAIK, Judge Alsup has effectively said to Google that they didn’t do enough to get this dismissed out of hand, and that he was going to allow discovery to go ahead. Once discovery was over, Google can file again for dismissal then.
I would take this to mean that if discovery shows that the files are indeed merely interoperability information (API headers) and/or files written by Google in the first place, as Google contends, then there would be a good case for dismissal of the copyright allegations at that time. If the facts are still in dispute, then dismissal would not happen.