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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @03:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @03:28PM (#794076)

    Should pedals, stick gear shift and steering wheel be patented?. Imagine that, every car maker should make their own driving system. Some with buttons, some with sticks, some with levers. That would be a total chaos and don't mention getting your driver's license, because you'll need to take the car's maker driving course and get certified for it. And good luck trying to change car maker brand, It would be a really crazy world.

    NOTE: In The begining it may have been patented, but in some pint in time the patent expired or some government office of normalization made it the standard that every maker should abide.

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