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posted by martyb on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the application-programming-INTERFACE dept.

The Obama administration has asked the United States Supreme Court to decline Google's appeal against a 2014 federal appeals court ruling finding copyright infringement of Oracle's Java code:

The case involves how much copyright protection should extend to the Java programing language. Oracle won a federal appeals court ruling last year that allows it to copyright parts of Java, whilst Google argues it should be free to use Java without paying a licencing fee. Google, which used Java to design its Android smartphone operating system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court then asked the Obama administration in January for its opinion on whether it should take the case because the federal government has a strong interest. The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, must ensure companies do not break antitrust laws when claiming software copyright protection against each other.

According to Google, an Oracle victory would obstruct "an enormous amount of innovation" because software developers would not be able to freely build on each others' work. But Oracle says effective copyright protection is the key to software innovation.

In the court filing on Tuesday, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said Google's argument that the code is not entitled to copyright protection lacks merit and did not need to be reviewed by the Supreme Court. Verrilli added that Google had raised important concerns about the effect that enforcement of Oracle's copyright could have on software development, but said those issues could be addressed via further proceedings on Google's separate "fair use" defence in San Francisco federal court.

Google v. Oracle, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 14-410


[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by rliegh on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:01PM

    by rliegh (205) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:01PM (#189177)

    This ruling -which is inevitable now, means the end of open source and the begining of the era when larger companies (Maya, Photoshop) go after their revenue-stealing open source counterparts (Blender, GIMP) and shut them down.

    The future, my friends, is totally fucked.

    --
    I just tell 'em the truth and they think it's trolling!
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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by Placenta on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:12PM

    by Placenta (5264) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:12PM (#189184)

    The threat posed by Blender and GIMP to commercial competitors is about as dangerous as the threat that Tonka construction equipment poses to Caterpillar.

    Blender and GIMP are toys compared to the commercial options. They've been no more than toys for many years. Anyone using them wouldn't even be a potential customer for the commercial offerings.

    • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:18PM

      by frojack (1554) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:18PM (#189193) Journal

      I fail to see how blender and gimp are involved here.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 1) by Placenta on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:19PM

        by Placenta (5264) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:19PM (#189194)

        Read the comment I replied to.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:15PM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:15PM (#189188) Journal

    There has been no ruling.

    And the "White House" and Obama had nothing to do with it. It was the equally clueless Justice Department, who submitted a brief in response to a Supreme Court invitation to comment. SCOTUS asks for amicus briefs on just about every case, DOJ responds on almost every case. Justice wouldn't know a header file if it bit them in the ass.

    This administration has pretty much run out of good will with the courts, and the court is clearly able to see the government has no legitimate reason to be on one side of the issue vs the other, and will arrive at the conclusion that favors were owed and are being repaid. If you listen carefully you can just about hear the "plonk" from here.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 1) by Placenta on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:17PM

      by Placenta (5264) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:17PM (#189191)

      Java doesn't use header files.

      • (Score: 2) by jcross on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:01PM

        by jcross (4009) on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:01PM (#189261)

        I bet most implementations of a JVM do though, and I think that's probably what's in question here.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:17PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:17PM (#189192) Homepage
    If, however, it only spells the end to Java, then I say bring it on. The sooner the better. Maybe Oracle should also sue all websites with embedded java applets too, to help speed up forward progress.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 1) by Placenta on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:22PM

      by Placenta (5264) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:22PM (#189196)

      Java's going to be around forever, regardless of what happens in this particular case. There is more Java code out there than you could ever hope to imagine. A lot of it will be in use for many years to come.

      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:21PM (#189232)

        Hah! They said the same thing about COBOL!! And it didn't have headers either!

        • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 29 2015, @12:09AM

          by tangomargarine (667) on Friday May 29 2015, @12:09AM (#189411)

          Are you kidding? From my brief stint in COBOL-land (a single course in college) I remember writing 5 pages of string declarations for a program with 2 pages of actual code.

          Okay so maybe not really headers, but still.

          --
          "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:50PM

        by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:50PM (#189277)

        There are many languages a lot worse than Java. It sucks that Oracle owns it, but Java and other JVM based languages are pretty good in general in my opinion. If you find Java too strictly typed or verbose, try Groovy. I recently cut the amount of source in one large package by about 50% by switching to to Groovy. It took about half an hour to switch the source to Groovy, delete a lot of the boilerplate code and do a minor change to the build process. Less code to maintain, more readability, and still works perfectly with Java.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday May 29 2015, @09:02AM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday May 29 2015, @09:02AM (#189575) Homepage
          No language apart from Java that I know requires that you create a new Integer object to have the integer value 0, because integers aren't objects. (Whilst at the same time permitting the constant integer-but-not-an-object ``0'' to have some meaning.)

          No language apart from Java that I know of would take 5 major versions of the language to realise that the inefficiency caused by the above was horrifically stupid, and then, rather than fixing the problem, simply cache all pre-made integers between -128 and 127, so that the overhead would be a bit lower. For 256 Integers, that is.

          No language apart from Java that I know of has such baroque syntax for dealing with bignums, in particular when trying to use not-an-object integers as parameters to bignum methods. ``y = x.multiply(BigInteger.valueOf(10));'' is somehow deemed superior to ``y = x*10;''

          No language apart from Java that I know would first make System.in mutable, and then when people started changing it make it final, thus immutable, and then later add a setter setIn() so that you can *change the value of a final variable*.

          It's a turd, there's no other word for it. And like COBOL, yes it will still be around in decades. The IT world's like that.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by WillR on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:10PM

      by WillR (2012) on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:10PM (#189229)
      A broad precedent that APIs have always been copyrightable is the the end of technology in the US. All the languages descended from K&R C and all the OSes derived from Unix (GNU/Linux, Android, OS X, iOS, the BSDs, the commercial unixen, zillions of embedded Linux devices) all become property of Novell. Everything with a BIOS becomes property of IBM. The Windows kernel goes to whoever owns VMS now (HP?).

      Software development would all move to countries where copyright is a joke... how's your Mandarin?
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:43PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:43PM (#189248)

        I think it's bad, but I don't think it's that bad. The Regents of UC Berkeley have already placed the entire OS under the BSD license. They are not suddenly going to turn around and clamp down on syscalls.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Adamsjas on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:08PM

        by Adamsjas (4507) on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:08PM (#189290)

        Not all doom and gloom.

        Most of those organizations will simply declare their API interface files as open source. Not many are as short sighted as Oracle.

        Trying to lock up your API definitions is like trying to charge admission to walk on the sidewalk leading to your supermarket. With three other markets across the street, and another one every 6 blocks, it won't take long for that lesson to be learned.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:47PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:47PM (#189375)

          > Most of those organizations will simply declare their API interface files as open source.

          Great. And what about abandonware? No business will ever clone an API that they can't get official copyright permission for.

          When copyright is used to change the default permissions from "allow all" to "deny allow" the result is ossification where all the oddball corner cases turn into dead-ends instead of opportunities. Unfortunately it is those odd-ball corner-cases where creativity is the most extreme.

  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:51PM (#189217)

    What good is the legal system if it's only used for evil, not for good?

    Why doesn't someone sue red hat over System D? Surely there's a case...

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Placenta on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:57PM

      by Placenta (5264) on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:57PM (#189221)

      Are you talking about how systemd is similar in so many ways to how Windows works?

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:03PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:03PM (#189224)

    You may be interested in reading some of the recently outed text from the recently leaked "Trade In Services Agreement (TISA)" [eff.org]. From the EFF's text:

    The agreement would also prohibit countries from enacting free and open source software mandates. Although “software used for critical infrastructure” is already carved out from this prohibition (and so is software that is not “mass market software”, whatever that means), there are other circumstances in which a country might legitimately require suppliers to disclose their source code.

    Yes, the future is pretty bleak. The blanket of corporation mandated "agreements" that generally go against the interests of citizens on both sides of the agreement is staggering.

    • (Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:41PM

      by The Archon V2.0 (3887) on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:41PM (#189275)

      > Although “software used for critical infrastructure” is already carved out from this prohibition (and so is software that is not “mass market software”, whatever that means),

      Voting machines aren't part of infrastructure, and can be sold in many markets.

      Uh-oh.

      • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:50PM

        by Nerdfest (80) on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:50PM (#189278)

        I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday May 29 2015, @12:06AM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Friday May 29 2015, @12:06AM (#189410)

        Yes, of course the ability to accurately count votes isn't critical in a democracy. *flips table*

        I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:26AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @02:26AM (#189944)

          Counting votes with machines that use proprietary software is foolish, unethical, and dangerous. Most voting machines are like that, as well as just insecure.