Google’s Kent Walker, SVP of Global Affairs & Chief Legal Officer, in a company blog post:
Today we asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review our long-running copyright dispute with Oracle over the use of software interfaces. The outcome will have a far-reaching impact on innovation across the computer industry.
Standardized software interfaces have driven innovation in software development. They let computer programs interact with each other and let developers easily build technologies for different platforms. Unless the Supreme Court steps in here, the industry will be hamstrung by court decisions finding that the use of software interfaces in creating new programs is not allowed under copyright law.
This is one of those rare cases where pretty much everyone I know stands firmly behind Google. Oracle’s lawsuit is scummy, dirty, destructive, and spiteful – Larry Ellison was one of Steve Jobs’ closest friends, and Oracle’s lawsuit started right around the time Jobs vowed to go “thermonuclear war” on Android. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together here.
I hope the United States Supreme Court shuts this case down in favour of Google and common sense once and for all.
Hm, “pretty much everyone”, but not everyone – IIRC Java creator said that Google has slimed Sun…
In the words of moondevil ( https://www.osnews.com/story/30243/federal-court-overturns-oracle-v-google/#comment-654838 )
Though in all, it’s almostcertainly better for us that Google prevailed…
> Though in all, it’s almost certainly better for us that Google prevailed…
since dropping “do no evil”, and shuttering up various services to try to force people into google+ just ’cause they were late to the social media party…. meh I wouldn’t miss google, if they vanished overnight, my open source android rom would still be worked on, and its been years since I’ve bothered with any of googles services….
codifies,
Yeah, google has way too much power. I think it’d be much better for competition and consumers if these titans could be reduced to a fraction of their current size.
But, in terms of API copyrights, I think it’s a blow to the industry since it means that merely being API compatible becomes grounds for a copyright lawsuit. As much as we may not care for google, they can obviously afford to lawyer their way out of this. However the same cannot be said of smaller guys, and google themselves could even exploit API copyrights to kill off competition if they wanted to. So IMHO we shouldn’t think about API copyrights in terms of google vs oracle/sun, but instead in terms of the long term effects that API copyrights will have on the industry.
Yup, the outcome of this case could have far reaching consequences for smaller software vendors… (though sure, ideally I would like a less evil Google that bought Sun for a nice sum, so all is well; but we don’t live in such world 🙁 )
> Larry Ellison was one of Steve Jobs’ closest friends, and Oracle’s lawsuit started right around the time Jobs vowed to go “thermonuclear war” on Android. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together here.
No Thom, I think you need to elaborate on your conspiracy theory here. Please, go in depth on how Oracle is continuing this feud as a _personal favor_ from Larry Ellison to the long dead Steve Jobs over Google’s theft of the Android touch interface from iOS.
That’s a strawman, since it doesn’t need to be a personal favour. Steven and Larry are business’s most notorious arseholes. They just have to agree with each other that they can get rich from screwing over Android. You don’t need any personal pact to simply agree that there is an opportunity to be an arsehole here.
This article excerpt is the most important line of the whole argument against Oracle:
walid,
We’re long past the terms that the founders found reasonable. These days copyrights can go beyond a century. It has absolutely nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with unchecked greed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_term
I’m going to go out on an unpopular limb here and say that I’m actually with Oracle on this (yes, that did feel a little “gross” to type). Why shouldn’t the API be able to be copyrighted? The use of “standardized software interfaces” has definitely been a major enabler to technology growth. However, this is the consequence of adopting a company’s product, open or not, as a “standard”, instead of using an actual standard. That doesn’t work with something like C++ or even JavaScript because nobody “owns” C++, it’s run by an impartial standards committee. They chose to use Oracle’s product as a standard interface and replace it with their own implementation. They certainly could have chosen a different language that was actually open, but they didn’t, and there’s consequences to that.
CodeMonkey,
I hate to be the one to resort to car metaphors here, but alas think about unauthorized 3rd party manufactures selling addons/repair parts for your car. It’s true they copied the original “interfaces”, but the fact is that copying interfaces is usually necessary for compatibility with your car. If you make copying of the original interfaces illegal, then you effectively prohibit 3rd party repairs & components. Consumers would rightly be in an uproar if this happened. While consumers don’t tend to think much about software APIs, it is effectively the same problem as it applies to software.
When you say 3rd parties should be using standard interfaces, well that’s a fine suggestion except that 3rd parties and consumers don’t have control over the interfaces that manufactures choose to use. Here’s a short joke to highlight the silliness of not being able to clone propriety interfaces:
Historically, the implementation of a language would be protected, but anyone was free to independently build their own implementation regardless of if the language was a standard or not. What would have been the problem of continuing down this track? What is the underlying moral justification in prohibiting developers like me from reimplimenting computer languages and interfaces? Maybe the authors don’t like sharing APIs with competing implementations, but the underlying purpose of government policy is supposed to be to maximize the public benefit, which means competing implementations should be allowed. Corporations have lobbied to expand copyrights well beyond their original intentions. Ultimately governments have become corrupt and abandoned their public service mandates, but there was a time when freedom was the default and restrictions would have to be justified with some public interest. It’s disheartening to see the evolution of the DMCA and copyright laws under corporate influence turning the tide against public interests.
“Ultimately”? 😛 It was never quite rosy…
That didn’t work, until this ruling. The simple problem with copyrighting APIs – ie, the interfaces -, is how can the courts tell the difference between, say, a header file that was written from scratch to conform to a standard, vs a header file that was copied from an existing implementation? Remember, they made it a copyright issue, then they struck down that an API is fair use under copyright.
For a language, you can’t have “alternate” declarations of an API because they have to be exact. That’s what an API is, the I part. And copyright covers the materially substantial aspect of a work, which in the case of APIs, is merely the name of a function and a function signature (ie, for functions). Whitespace doesn’t matter, and parameter names don’t matter.