Or is this opening round just legal theater, and the real decisions will be handed down by experts in the US Federal Circuit court after an inevitable succession of appeals?
In any case it would be difficult for the trial judge or the Federal Circuit to ignore jury decisions on factual questions like the ones that were decided here, unless the result was egregiously wrong. Legal questions like whether APIs are copyrightable will almost certainly be reviewed on appeal.
[added] The dangers of judges who are too specialized was actually recognized when the Federal Circuit was set up, so the court was also given jurisdiction over a few other areas, such as appeals from the Court of Federal Claims, to prevent it from being overly specialized. I haven’t seen recent figures, but I do believe that the docket is dominated by patent cases.
The ownership of IP is, in a sense, a private good (excludable and rivalrous), just like a car. Take patents - can buy and sell them, they're hard to steal, and only one person can have it.
However, the right to use (not own) IP is not a private good. While the original copyright or patent may be unique (therefore rivalrous) and easy to defend (thus excludable), expressions of it are not.
Non-excludable, non-rivalrous goods (the right to use IP) are a little harder to reason about.
Patents, on the other hand, are excludable and rivalrous only in the tautological sense. They are defined within law as excludable and rivalrous, so therefore they are excludable and rivalrous.
Patents could be redefined in numerous ways that are not excludable and rivalrous, such as including anyone else who can give reasonable proof that they came up with the idea at the same time or independently. Also, it would not be that great a stretch to limit their transferability, so that they cannot be treated as a normal asset.
Yes, and it's really easy to con people with the tautological definition.
"Of course IP is just property. You can buy it, and sell it, just like a car".
By the same argument, piracy is not theft but license infringement. The whole thing is so abstract, it's easy for people to muddy the waters.
What this article refers to (using poor, imprecise language in the headline) is the jury's finding that Google copied, in the literal sense of the term, the Java API's. This is something the jury is totally qualified to decide. They can see the snippets of code put forth as evidence. They might not understand how it works, but they can see whether they are similar or not.
From here, the judge will decide whether API's are copyrightable. This is the real show. We know Google copied the API, the real question in this trial is whether that API is protectable under copyright law. The judge will answer this question.
After that, the jury will answer whether Google's copying is eligible for the fair use defense. That is to say, even if they did copy, and even if API's are protectable, was Google's use nonetheless of a kind that qualifies as "fair use." This decision doesn't really involve "nerd esoterica."
I think the jury did just fine. They have punted on the hard problem, but I think the rest of their determinations are quite fair. This doesn't look like the case that will impeach the jury system to me.
"After the partial copyright verdict was read, Judge Alsup launched right into the patent phase without even giving a break. Right now, the jury is watching a video about patents and patent lawsuits produced by the Federal Judicial Center, which is commonly shown to patent juries. Court will probably adjourn after opening statements today, and witnesses will begin testifying tomorrow, possibly including a repeat show by Jonathan Schwartz, the ex-Sun CEO. The patent phase is expected to be concluded in as little as one week. "
"nerd" stuff doen't have monopoly on complex
At the end of the day, I'm OK with "random" juries making these decisions. There is quite a bit of apparatus in place to prevent major error, and the law can always be changed (obviously it's not easy to do so, but it's possbile) in response to an undesirable decision.
It doesn't sound like he'll be making that ruling until at least midway through this month.
Edit: I'm not sure mistrial is precisely what I mean. Maybe just re-trial? Any clarification would be appreciated.
The policies of politicos is a much more grey area with consequences not so immediate and very subjective many, many years after the fact.
Let me rephrase that.
> If some issue cannot be understood by 12 random people heavily influenced by two multi-million dollar legal teams [...]
And now imagine "issue" being anything you're not intimately familiar with. There are many things in this world that I fail to understand, and probably never will. Law on this level is just as complicated as any other advanced topic, and the effect of a judgement on society can be profound.
I totally don't get the whole jury thing in cases as technical/complex as this (and by that I don't mean the computer science aspect, but the law aspect).
Where deep technical knowledge is required to understand the implications of a verdict, I think that the "community" should be defined as the community whose domain is primarily effected (in this case, computer scientists/software engineers). This doesn't sound too horrible to me.
Perhaps the fact that we need specialized juries should be a signal that our law is too specialized. Most things that should be illegal can be described rather succinctly when it gets down to it, and I think "no way twelve random people could comprehend" could be useful bright barrier line for "Maybe we're losing a little bit of control here..."
it's less complex than economy when someone have to be judged for debt. it's less complex than forensic medicine when one have to be judged for murder.
stop acting like it's a secret circle only you were able to enter.
the million dollar legal teams will bring in experts, those experts will explain what's their expert opinion on the fact. the 12 average joes will decide, and life will go on. If you think million dollar teams can just pay experts to say anything, the other team's expert will point that out to that other team and other legal mechanism will punish the one lying.
now, if it were Google vs John Doe, then i'd be sorry for poor john.
I think the fact that you have two opposing teams of "experts" makes it even more difficult for the jury; Oracle surely brings people in that talk about APIs in more concrete terms so that they can strengthen their copyright claim, and Google surely brings in people that say, "No, an API is just a set of concepts that trigger magic in some other code", and I think that normal people would just be more confused after hearing this.
Wouldn't it be better to simply recognize this is a case that requires deep technical knowledge, find software people who do not have a bias one way or the other toward Google/Oracle, and put them on the jury, where they will understand the extreme consequences of ruling that APIs represent copyright infringement, instead of just sitting twelve random people in front of two or three short videos and expecting them to grasp that the outcome of the case here will effect and set precedent as to whether clean-room implementations anywhere are legitimate, and what that means? If this precedent was set way back when it may even have been construed to apply to implementations of protocols like HTTP; imagine the consequences if some early player like Urbana-Champaign was given the copyright to the "HTTP API" and no one except them was allowed to write a browser that used HTTP (without licensure). Also, I hope no one here depends on WINE.
Do we really expect any set of twelve random people to understand this is the kind of decision to which they are contributing?