Insanity Wins as Appeals Court Overturns Google's Fair Use Victory for Java APIs | Hacker News Reader

Insanity Wins as Appeals Court Overturns Google's Fair Use Victory for Java APIs

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31 pointscgtyoder6 comments

Holy moly, is this still the case about like a 10 line chunk of code? And it's still going on? I can't believe Oracle hasn't gotten more bad press for this. What an obvious moneygrab attempt... Hopefully this will be overturned again by someone with a bit more brains as it has terrible implications for other work done in the past couple of decades.

> Holy moly, is this still the case about like a 10 line chunk of code?

62 class headers. Because Android and Java have a compatible API.

In the progress of this ridiculous case, APIs have been found to be non-copywritable, up until the CAFC got involved. Judges with expert testimony, and expert experience have repeatedly said they are not able to be copywrited. On all four fair-use factors.

CAFC then gets the case and removes jury testimony, and overturns previous decisions through things such as saying Android is opensource, it is commercial in the same manner that Napster was.

Despite Android's API have different subclasses, methods, and body, the CAFC did not believe that they altered the "expressive content" of Java's API.

Whoever ran this trial doesn't seem to grasp the bare basics of code.

This is just a fight between two evil for-profit companies. Designing APIs cost time/effort/money. Coding it is the easy part.

Reading through why CAFC suddenly decided a differing implementation wasn't transformative, ignoring several juries and judges, makes me think that CAFC would rule that clang's pragmas that are compatible with GCC must also be a copyright violation.

The court's definition makes no sense.

Wow, enough mockery and name-calling?

I am actually with Oracle on this whole thing. Calling Android “fair use” is the insane argument, as legal experts have said. Fair use is a narrow exemption, not meant to apply to huge corporations and commercial products. Android is a commercial product; Google even tried to argue that! Google is not akin to a library performing a public service by making Android. Android is not Java “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.” (The fact that senior people at Google seem to honestly believe that Android would have to at least be a little more of a profit center to be impeachable on copyright grounds is straight out of an HBO script.)

Google’s own engineers didn’t think it would be legal to copy Java and “scrub the J word” (actual quote) without licensing from Oracle. The emails are damning. They knew it wouldn’t be a “clean-room reimplementation” of the APIs, and it wasn’t. Also, the Java “API” includes the entire behavior of the standard library. Whether or not APIs are copyrightable (a gray area to be sure), I think it’s misleading to compare the Java APIs to other examples of “interfaces.” In any case, Oracle showed that portions of code were either copy-pasted or heavily “recollected,” so I say they did their job showing they have a real case. They don’t deserve to be mocked.

> Calling Android “fair use” is the insane argument, as legal experts have said.

Every step of this case, until CAFC, showed the opposite of that, that Android met all four requirements, which is more than enough. That would seem far from insane.

> In any case, Oracle showed that portions of code were either copy-pasted or heavily “recollected,” so I say they did their job showing they have a real case.

They didn't. They showed only that the definitions were the same. Not the methods, subclasses, nor body. Only the API.

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