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Having written an IDE, an API, and having gone through the copyright process for software before, I have at least a little understanding the current debate between Google and Oracle. While the general consensus seems to be that Google is right, I disagree. Here are my reasons.
1. There is very poor support for software copyrights at the U.S. Copyright Office. This is true to such an extent that it is practically trade interference. Like or not, the copyright office is almost universally unwilling to review file formats that are aren't developed by Microsoft.
The costs associated with patents are extraordinarily high, and the procedures for using the patent system is so obfuscated that it is meaningless for software. It might be practical to create a filing system for APIs that are separate class of design patent. But the real issue here, is nobody in the USPTO or the the Copyright Office wants to serve the software industry.
API copyrights provides an abbreviated basis for for dealing with the copyright office, and provides an easier mechanism for courts to understand. It is trivial to rename elements of source code in a piece of work and make it appear to not be the same work, though fundamentally it is. Contrary to this APIs must be the same to be useful. This means that distinguishing infringement is easier for them, which makes it easier for me to establish a protectable space for my work.
2. Protocols are underdeveloped. One of the huge arguments made by Google supporters is that API copyright will break protocols. Yes they will. This is a good thing. We should be doing more in protocol development and less in presentation development. It is a simple fact that civil rights in domestic communications is a technically achievable thing that has very little support from the commercial sector. Backwards compatibility has created market pressures that have preserved insecure systems architectures, and that has had a very negative effect on civil rights.
API copyrights will break backwards compatibility. But more importantly, they will preserve the market space of forward compatibility. Which is to say that API copyrights will have a positive effect on mitigating Embrace Extend Extinguish (EEE) business strategies. This is very good for FOSS in particular, and it will be good for the Internet, because it will force a more diverse protocol stack into existence. Sorry IETF, but we are way past the point where there is any excuse for the current state of the TCP/IP Internet.
3. If you are writing clean code, you are writing an API. If you are using Object Orientation correctly, everything you do during the development cycle contributes to the creation of an API. The only exception is the main() loop, which aggregates all of these API calls. Which means (drum roll) if you write clean code in a modern programming language, you are writing protectable code.
The semantic differences that people make over API vs. code are ridiculous. The Copyright Office currently accepts "compendiums" as copyrightable works. An API is a compendium of function calls, sans the underlying functions. But BOTH are copyrightable. There is nothing in an API copyright that prevents you from copyrighting the underlying source code as well. C has always done something similar by separating header and source files. So does your header file deserve less copyright than your source code? Hardly.
All the API copyright does is create a legal namespace that is unique to your project. It is more akin to a trademark than it is copyright or patent. But in any case, there is a need for lawfully protectable namespace in software.
4. It will fragment the software industry. Software engineers are notoriously cantankerous characters. If small software projects and library writing become more protected by copyright, then independent software development will be more profitable.
5. The whole case might be a put-on. Maybe Google is just shouting: "Don't throw me in that briar patch!", to each judge as they pass by. Both of these companies have huge back catalogs of software, all of which would be massively more litigable if Oracle wins. I believe this to be true and regard the variability of the outcome as slight. If they are playing Potemkin village to the highest court in the land, well that is their prerogative. They paid the lawyers to put on the show after all.
YMMV
Anonymous
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday November 19 2019, @09:09AM (2 children)
I'm a mathematician and a computer scientist.
You're wrong.
The facts of maths may well be protected, but copyright is about expression. If I write a maths book, you can't just copy it word for word and sell it or give it away. Same for a computer program. Everyone can write an A* algorithm but YOUR A* algorithm is under your copyright as an expression of your own.
Nobody is trying to "copyright" 2+2. You can't. It would be thrown out as a nonsense. But if you write a 3rd-year university textbook about the deep internals of calculus, or a piece of software that calculates flightpaths, you have to protect that in some fashion. Failing to do so means that nobody bothers to try to find new things, because they can't make a living doing so. Universities hire lecturers and professors because they create content that the university can sell, be that books, papers or just sheer knowledge in a lecture format. Without that, they wouldn't bother - universities would become nothing more than closed off, secretive research-labs that wouldn't want to tell you a thing about anything they discovered because you'd just "steal" it.
As a result, most of the lecturers and professors would run a mile for a country that protects their income and their organisations and their rights. There's a reason that universities tend to be the bastions of things like copyright law and open-source licensing enforcement.
Though I hold close to view that are considered socialist/communist in some respects, it's really more than I believe in a utopia where we could just do this - where taxes would pay for people to do research which would be open to all and everyone benefited from every discovery automatically. It ain't gonna happen in a human society, at least for a very, very, long time. Governments themselves are money-driven and greedy, enough to make education a pay-for exercise nowadays.
Fact is that the current system actually tends to work - imagine spending your life writing your first novel only to have it cloned and distributed worldwide in seconds, with your name stripped off, and you get nothing for it except "having written a book" that you can't prove and nobody else believes. Copyright is there for a reason. It's often abused, but that just means it needs tweaking (e.g. ridiculous copyright terms until things fall into the public domain).
But, in this case, copyright boundaries happen to be about right. Your expression of a task is copyrightable. But the interface that you are conforming to for that task, which is a largely arbitrary decision of very limited scope, is not. That lets people build on your software, replace your software, improve your software, but not steal your software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:30PM
you cannot copyright digital media.
as a scientist you know that a computer onky wirks because it processes data and to do that it needs to make (internal) copies. it is a copy machine.
next: one should not be able to copyright data/information that helps humans understand the world better and thus make humans happier.
we are thus left with stuff that is basically useless data (knowing or not knowing it doesnt contribute to your overall wellbeing) that can be copyrighted out the wazzo and back again (and only if it is not reliant on a digital data processing device -aka- computer).
that's my opinion only.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @12:38PM
Who owns the copyright of 'hello world'? In every language there are just so many ways to write it (sure there are countless ways to obfuscate/make it your own but using the most basic cout or printf in main, there's not that many)