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A comment on Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google. Parent comment

Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by dmix on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @12:52PM (#16690387)
> what if instead it was a small startup who simply couldn't afford that cost?

Licensing costs can scale according to the customers business size and revenue. What is more concerning is that this may create precedent that API specs are copyrightable -- to the degree they are worth billions in damages.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by simias on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:00PM (#16690467)
Licensing costs are arbitrary. If you want to license some IP from me I can ask for a billion dollar for it. Or I can simply refuse to sell it. The point is that IMO Google or anybody else shouldn't have to ask for permission for cleanly reimplementing an API.

I think some people in this thread are minimizing the issue because they don't like Google but I think it's naive and short-sighted. It's not about Google or Oracle, it's about copyrighting APIs.

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