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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @07:30PM (1 child)
The patent rules are supposed to prevent that. This scenario would mean the patent fails to be non-obvious to experts in the field.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday January 30 2019, @08:00PM
The description of the invention is specifically required to be "clear", as well as to enable - I forget the exact words but something like - "one practiced in the art" can reproduce the invention.
A while back I went to the Sunnyvale Patent Clearinghouse where lots of hardcopy patents were kept; if I remember correctly, the photocopier was free.
The LZW patent was seventy pages. I found it completely unintelligible.
Despite this, I've never head of a patent being quashed for being unclear, and have been meaning - in my infinite free time - to point out to Richard that to challenge unclear invention descriptions could be a useful avenue of attack.
So why would I both support patents and Richard Stallman?
Because I oppose _bad_ patents, not so much software patents as bad patents are found in many fields.
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