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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @08:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the chickens-coming-home-to-roost dept.

Google has appealed its case with Oracle to the Supreme Court of the United States over a dispute about whether a java API may be copyrighted.

The ARS Technica Story: Google asks Supreme Court to overrule disastrous ruling on API copyrights.

The consensus among the comments on ARS seem to be that this will result in a substantial amount of litigation. I'm forced to ask whether this future litigation should have happened already, and that this paradigm shift is just a matter of catching up to the effects of a previous bad ruling Lotus v. Borland from the early 1990s.

I get that it is going to cause a lot of code refactoring. But won't that also create a lot of new products? The other thing to consider is that communications protocols are essentially API specifications. Historically intellectual property protection for protocols is very weak. Some (myself at least) would attribute the effectiveness of the EEE business tactic to the inability to defend protocol compatibility within the legal framework provided by the USPTO and Copyright Office.

Which is to say that an Oracle victory may expand the scope of FOSS licensing, giving FOSS developers more say over how their products are used. This would reduce barrier to entry in new communications product markets that are based on FOSS, and give more power to startups.

Yes it is going to be expensive for established players if Oracle wins. Most people seem to agree with that. That is the price of operating on a bad premise. Does it matter whether responsibility for the premise resides with a judge or a CEO? Aren't there also some upsides if Oracle wins? What are the trade offs?

Of course the whole thing could be a put on.


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  • (Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:43AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:43AM (#793990) Journal

    All good and dandy, except:

    • A stands fo Application, not Authoized or even Authored
    • P stands for Programming - not for Public (and much less for Pubic). Why, one can haz non-public API-s, like the one Microsoft used in their office suite and kept mum 'bout to Corel. Or Novel. Or whoever the WordPerfect suc... err... owner was at the time [wikipedia.org].
    • I stands for first person singular. Like in: I, me, myself, mine, my_precious [soylentnews.org]**, I have full rights on it as an author (grin)

    (still grinning) So, you see, you are acronymically wrong. But I must admit, nobody surpassed you in the elegance in being wrong on purpose, magister, your style is the supremerest!

    ---

    ** All cited works belong to their authors. Their partial reproduction here was fully attributed and was made under the "fair use" doctrine.
    So, esteemed author, not a cent from me.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Interesting=1, Informative=1, Funny=1, Touché=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Touché' Modifier   0  
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    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:56PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday January 30 2019, @11:56PM (#794291) Journal

    Guilty as charged. Knew I would be caught, just didn't think it would be c0lo that would do the catching. Seems better this way.

  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:38PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Thursday January 31 2019, @05:38PM (#794607) Journal

    A Punishable Interface?

    --
    This sig for rent.