Oracle are winning in the 'copyright an api' legal fight

[KevinWorkman]

@Roquen

Off the topic of this thread…but that’s exactly what they didn’t do. They cut corners and actually did violate copyrights. This was demonstrated by the internal memos. An important part of US law is intent and they stepped over the line and the completed system was not clean-room.

Maybe I don’t understand the details of the argument, so can you provide any sources that explain how Android “cut corners”?

Most of my information is coming from this wikipedia article and this EFF article, and neither one mentions anything other than reimplementing the API.

[CommanderKeith]

@nsigma

@Abuse

Surely it’s quite the opposite though; the API can only be expressed in one form,

That’s a tautological argument. The process(es) which the API expresses could be expressed in another form as a different API.

@Abuse

a precise set of class, field & method signatures.

And documented behaviour! Without that the API is pretty much worthless. With that, in particular in the specification of behaviour between components, you start to get the expression of the idea (IMO).

@Abuse’s point is interesting. If copying the entire api is not possible, then compatibility is broken. Applying this logic to vmware and other hypervisors, which rip off entire operating systems’ apis, they are all illegally copying (and distributing, @princec) and owe licensing fees to Apple and Microsoft.
Indeed, Java itself rips off windows apis such as the file system, or windowing toolkit, and every other api that exposes operating system functionality. Therefore oracle owes licensing fees to the operating system developers.
Obviously this is silly, but this chain of thought seems consistent with oracle’s and some of your arguments.

[nsigma]

@CommanderKeith

If copying the entire api is not possible, then compatibility is broken.

Not necessarily, because interoperability would come under fair use. Interesting in this case is that Google deliberately designed Android not to be compatible …

@CommanderKeith

Obviously this is silly, but this chain of thought seems consistent with oracle’s and some of your arguments.

My only argument is that it’s a somewhat arbitrary line deciding that code can be copyright but API’s can’t, as if they exist in some vacuum from each other.

Incidentally it seems at some point Google tried to argue that code shouldn’t be copyrightable either, only patentable. Oh joy! See, neither side is right in this argument but both sides may (inadvertently) f**k things up even more than they are already.

I’m on neither side - I’m sitting on the fence munching popcorn.