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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 ninkendo on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:11PM (#16690618)
Devil’s advocate here... the method signatures, the layout of the classes, what inherits from what, what bits are private vs public, are all pretty non-trivial. Moreover it’s where a lot of the subjective decision making happens, whereas the actual implementations are straightforward once you know what the method signatures should be.

I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:14PM (#16690642)
Triviality isn't the determining factor of what's copyrightable.

Edit: And particularly there's tons of case law that this stuff isn't copyrightable, see Sony v. Bleem, where a company literally wrote an emulator of a PS1, and courts said that was fine. Even to straight up sell as a competing product, and for running on competitors machines.

Edit2: And the otherwise shitty DMCA even has explicit exemptions for software interoperability purposes.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by treis on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:32PM (#16690825)
In Sony v. Bleem they used blackbox testing and created their own original code from that. If Google had done the sam they would have been fine.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:38PM (#16690893)
Because of Java's reflection, a black box approach would have given you the same API names that are being discussed here.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by hcknwscommenter on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @01:02AM (#16695425)
Not necessarily. You don't have to "look" at the reflection.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by monocasa on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @11:27AM (#16698412)
You do to be API compliant.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by hcknwscommenter on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @01:01AM (#16695421)
Bleem did not copy. An emulator is not necessarily a copy.
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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by wvenable on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @02:24PM (#16691337)
I think it's important to remember what copyright is meant to protect -- expressions of ideas. You can't copyright the structure of an engine in a car. You can't copyright medicine.

There is a bit of a "intellectual property" slippy slope going on here. Whether or not something is useful or non-trivial is inconsequential.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @02:53PM (#16691627)
> You can't copyright the structure of an engine in a car. //

You could design an engine to have an artistic structure. What you couldn't then do is stop anyone copying the functional parts of the engine and leaving out the purely artistic elements.

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Re:Oracle Wins Revival of Billion-Dollar Case Against Google by justonepost on Tuesday March 27, 2018 @01:32PM (#16690833)
What's reallly non trivial is getting developers to uptake a new APi they are unfamiliar with.
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