Google did clean room implementation of almost all functions. They copied 9 lines of implementation code verbatim - out of thousands of lines. It does raise a question in my mind as to how that one function got copies, but it's also possible that it was re-implemented and happened to be done exactly the same without looking at the original - I honestly don't know but Google conceded it was a duplicate either way. 9 Lines. Not a wholesale infringement - seems pretty straightforward.

Those 9 lines got copied because the function was going to get donated to openjdk anyway, so it would be stupid to rewrite a simple 9 line function that it used as that would be pointless duplication after it was merged.

So a Google employee was donating code to Oracle, and they sued them for it. It's absolutely shameful behaviour.

>It does raise a question in my mind as to how that one function got copies, but it's also possible that it was re-implemented and happened to be done exactly the same without looking at the original

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?

Oracle's counsel was publicly admonished by Alsup for even trying to push that argument.

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 it—"

> So what's the furor about?

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".

> 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.

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.

That statement is at odds to APIs being copyrightable. If the API itself can't be used then how exactly is a clean room implementation of that API supposed to avoid the copyright issues of implementing the API?

I'm trying to understand here - is the idea that if they had put a bunch of developers who had never seen the API that they were implementing (normal clean rooms allow documentation, but api documentation is pretty much the signatures and that pretty much is the material we're talking about being copyrighted), provided the clean room engineers only with example code that used the apis and that they had to make work then they would most likely not have a problem, even if the resulting code had blocks that were character-for-character identical (since interfaces likely would come out identical to those they needed to be interoperable with)?

Obviously that sounds pretty crazy, but if it's true, it would at least be an approach that I could understand.

>normal clean rooms allow documentation

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.

Yes, and the normal way you do this is by having some people (who can be tainted) write a bunch of documentation. Then the documentation gets passed to the people working in the 'clean room' who then implement based on that documentation.

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.

Not a lawyer, and I agree with your overall point, but I think usage examples are as tainted as the raw API.If the API is copyrighted with no fair use exemption for interop, why would that protection not extend to the API usage which contain the same information? "void IFoo.bar()" and "myFoo.bar() // returns void" are pretty similar and equally as "infringing" IMO.

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.

Cool. So if I just make a Mickey Mouse cartoon from scratch I should be good.

Or a film about Snow White, Pinocchio, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty etc.

Sure. If you managed to actually do that. Of course courts are free to infer as to the unlikelihood of that.

Disney's whole strategy was taking public domain works like those and making cartoon versions.

There's nothing legally stopping you from doing the same; Disney does not own these stories.