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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: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:26AM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:26AM (#794461) Journal
    There was the legal spat between Microsoft and Sun over Java in the late 1990s, where Sun noticed that MS was up to its old EEE tricks again, and they slapped them down with a trademark infringement lawsuit. They basically said that sure, you can reimplement the Java API if you want, but you can't go around breaking shit and still call your implementation "Java". If you want to use the Java trademark, your implementation needs to pass the compatibility compliance tests. Microsoft's implementation didn't. That's part of the reason why we wound up with C# and .NET. Note that in this case it seems that Sun never considered that the Java APIs might be subject to copyright, the way Oracle who bought them later on now seems to.
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