Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all questions but one

Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by 0xABADC0DA on Friday May 04, 2012 @05:55PM (#3930507)

How so? Any jury, technical or not, should find 1A for Oracle.

"Has Oracle proven that Google has infringed the overall structure, sequence and organization of copyrighted works?"

As far as I can tell nobody disputes that Google lifted the Java API's structure, sequence, and organization from Sun, and the judge told them to consider SSO copyrightable. Most programmers think it's ok to rip off an API because otherwise the world will burn, or something, but 1A is asking what Google did not whether it was illegal.

My bet is the jury is held up on the fair use, either for implementation (1B) or documentation (2B). These are vague questions that can easily go either way. My bet is that they find 1B for Google (implementing the API is ok) but find 2B for Oracle (reprinting the API SSO is not ok). You have to implement the API to make it compatible, but you don't have to republish the API.

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by stdgy on Friday May 04, 2012 @07:49PM (#3930831)

I don't think either side disputes that Google implemented a portion of the Java API, which they copied from Apache Harmony. But they certainly seem to disagree on what qualifies as a meaningful definition of SSO, with Oracle arguing that both the entirety of Java and individual packages qualify as SSO.

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by rayiner on Friday May 04, 2012 @11:27PM (#3931237)

It's not the jury's job to decide whether that qualifies as SSO, that's the judge's job. It's the jury's job to decide what people actually did, whether they did what they say they did, etc.

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by stdgy on Sunday May 06, 2012 @03:21PM (#3936015)

One of the jury's jobs is to decide whether Google infringed upon Oracle's protected property. It would seem like they'd require a clear definition of SSO to be able to do that.

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by rbanffy on Friday May 04, 2012 @06:02PM (#3930526)

What is "copyrighted works" in the question and can an API be copyrighted?

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by coopdog on Friday May 04, 2012 @07:43PM (#3930820)

And do they still 'infringe' if it's classed as fair use?

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by taligent on Friday May 04, 2012 @06:19PM (#3930581)

I don't think the world would burn if APIs were copyrighted.

There are 'fair use' provisions and most companies would grant carte blanche to people to provide new implementations. I am actually struggling to think of an example other than Java.

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by tikhonj on Friday May 04, 2012 @06:30PM (#3930622)

So it would change nothing. In which case, why have them copyrightable at all? If companies aren't going to take advantage of it anyhow, it seems additionally pointless.

Fundamentally, the main reason to copyright something is to restrict others' use of it. Letting companies restrict their APIs' use would be unfortunate, so if it there is really no effect either way they should not be copyrightable.

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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google has reached a verdict on all que... by SoftwareMaven on Saturday May 05, 2012 @03:07AM (#3931558)

SCO/Calderra would have loved to be able to claim ownership of libc for all *nix OSes. That's the kind of thing this case could be moving towards. Im sure somebody would love their tithes for SQL, too.

It could get very ugly.

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