Re:Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster...
by az226 on Friday October 09, 2020 @09:41PM
(#24736107)
As I said, Google could have created new packages with the same functionality, but they didn’t. They copied Oracle’s Java libraries exactly. Even if you reimplement the implementing code, you’ve still copied a lot from the creative expression. One could argue that there’s more effort needed on part of designing the libraries than their underlying implementation, which would be much more straightforward.
>why should only the implementation be protected?
Because copyright only protects authorship. You are the owner of your own creative works but you are not the owner of other people's creative works. What Oracle wants is to prevent independent reimplementation of Java libraries which is clearly a case of patent law not copyright law.
The Java standard library casts a "shadow". That shadow is the API but the standard library is not the API. Someone who only looks at the shadow can rebuild their own version of the standard library without directly copying the standard library. This is called clean room design and it is done all the time. Patents are the primary way of preventing clean room designs by competitors.
The fact that people on HN are insisting on bloating copyright even further makes my blood boil. IP law already created lots of solutions for all these problems. Stop trying to shoehorn everything into copyright.