And yeah, I guess that IBM could start suing everybody... this whole situation is so ridiculous.
Other forms of structured metadata use cross-party?
Or IBM could realize if they start doing that, it might show the insanity of the current law, and result in the law changing back to what it was and should be, API's not copyrightable.
(And yes, I know: The overwhelming majority of the work was a clean room implementation, but not all. In retrospect, this was an unfortunate mistake by Google.)
What if I named my function 015342342(String 123949)? How does that change anything?
Without endorsement, there is definitely a line between text in which one can be "creative" and numbers in copyright law as written.
The problem here isn't the line between creative and non-creative, the problem here is the introduction of copyright, a concept created for expressive works, into a field that consists of functional works. It should not be a surprise to anyone, not even lawyers, that this isn't going to "just work". The surprise to me is that it has taken this long for this foundational clash to start emerging at a big scale.
The choice of call name in an API are arbitrary, the reuse of those names to interface with that API is not a creative copy it's a technical requirement.
If I make a toothed belt to fit a pair of gears, that's not an artistic expression no matter the the tooth pitch is an exact duplicate of that on the gears. If the gear is purple and orange spots, in a distinctive pattern, and I make my belt the same pattern then that's a copyright issue.
If the API calls were like "thisIsTheSummerOfOurDiscoTents(banana)" - such that the names are sufficient to be individual works of art, and weren't following a technical function, then perhaps you have an argument that the API is a work of literature, or otherwise an artistic creation.
It just sounds like a wrong decision was previously made and should now be overturned.
The real key point is in the second half, though. Arguing over whether or not a particular micro-decision is "creative" is the entirely wrong track to be taking when we're discussing something that is functional, that performs some real task in a way that a movie or song simply does not. Why would we expect standards based on "creativity" to apply to that in any sensible way?
It's impossible for a collection of letters to be creative but for that collection of letters when represented numerically to be no longer creative. If I make up some BS for how there's a correspondence between these symbols and other symbols (1=alpha, 2=bravo, ...; or 1=sandwich, 2=wellington, ...) - then 1383() is just sandwichBiscuitAppleBiscuit(). Then it's clear the creative aspects of the program, API, or whatever, don't lie in the specific choice of tokens.
Would a judge agree that providing a dictionary/key that says an arbitrary name for each number (easy to do programmatically) makes a program creative that otherwise wouldn't be. It's clearly ridiculous. Not least because it would mean that duplicating a work that was compressed, or represented in binary, would then no longer be a tort, because apparently numerical representation would rule out a work from being creative.
Seems pretty straightforward.
So a Google employee was donating code to Oracle, and they sued them for it. It's absolutely shameful behaviour.
They literally admit to having copied it.
All the hypotheticals trying to find the end of cleanroom dev in this case keep missing the point: They didn't do cleanroom dev. They admit to not having done it. Their defenses aren't organized around them doing it. So what's the furor about?
Alsup: "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?"
David Boies (counsel for Oracle): "I want to come back to rangeCheck."
Alsup: "rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do itβ"
Probably about the absurdity of being hit with potentially astronomical penalties for "copying" 9 lines of trivial code that's barely worth hitting ctrl-c for.
Obviously, common sense is - as always - distant from the pedantic nature of law and laywers, but just about anyone sane is gonna look at this and go "well that's just stupid".
IIRC, the literal copying of code was something for which the parties stipulated to $0 in damages; the potential liability is about copying the API, not the one trivial 9-line function.
Obviously that sounds pretty crazy, but if it's true, it would at least be an approach that I could understand.
Uhhh. No. Just no. I don't think you understand the meaning of "clean room" in this context. In this context, clean room means that the person in the room is untainted by any copyrighted information full stop.
The problem I'm describing is that in this case the kind of thing you'd typically want to write in that documentation is exactly the signatures of methods, which would amount to copying the copyrighted material and would taint the whole clean room. I'm trying to think of a way you could even do clean room engineering if the signatures of methods are copyright information. The reimplement from usage examples is the only thing I can come up with.
These $9 Billion dollars will look great on Oracles bottom line. The mega-billions in possible lost trade and efficiency make me think this ruling gets reversed with a vengeance.
There's nothing legally stopping you from doing the same; Disney does not own these stories.