Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs on fair use

Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by thereallurch on Monday May 07, 2012 @03:56PM (#3940683)

From OpenJDK:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

        if (fromIndex > toIndex)

            throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                       ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

        if (fromIndex < 0)
            throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);

        if (toIndex > arrayLen)
            throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

    }

From Google:

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

        if (fromIndex > toIndex)
            throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
                       ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");

        if (fromIndex < 0)
            throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);

        if (toIndex > arrayLen)
            throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

    }

}

Open and shut case. /s

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by gouranga on Monday May 07, 2012 @04:03PM (#3940723)

To be blatantly honest, that is exactly what I'd write. The implementation is trivial and obvious therefore the probability of them being the same is high.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by dminor on Monday May 07, 2012 @04:11PM (#3940761)

They were both written by Joshua Bloch, while working at Google. The first was for TimSort, which he donated to Sun/OpenJDK. He then reused the rangeCheck code in Android.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by krakensden on Monday May 07, 2012 @05:07PM (#3940979)

This sort of thing is a little scary. We can't know for certain whether he wrote the same code the same way twice, or if he copied and pasted it, but I can certainly imagine doing the former.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by duaneb on Monday May 07, 2012 @05:23PM (#3941030)

He copied and pasted:

Q. The rangecheck function: Did you copy the Sun code while working on Android?

A. I did that while working on Timsort, and it was during the period I was employed at Google, but not for Google. It was something I wrote on my own for OpenJDK.

[I had not heard of Timsort before; it's (apparently) a very efficient sort written by Tim Peters for Python (see Wikipedia), and ported by Bloch to Java.]

[Timsort will come up again later. I'm somewhat appalled by how much fuss is being made over the trivial "rangecheck" function.]

Q. Why did you copy the rangecheck function for Timsort?

A. It's good engineering to reuse the same function if possible [The context here was that he expected to fold Timsort into a public version of Java, and at that point it would make sense to call the existing rangecheck function from the new code rather than writing a different one.]

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by cullen on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @04:34PM (#3983895)

Oracle is claiming infringement and damages for something they (Sun) didn't even pay for? That's a lot of gall.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by ars on Monday May 07, 2012 @06:19PM (#3941226)

That's not the legal measure. If in fact they were both written identically, but independently there is no infringement. If it's totally obvious, but it was copied then there is infringement.

The takeaway is write it yourself - don't copy it without permission, even if it's so obvious. (And if it's so obvious then there really is hardly a reason to even copy it in the first place.)

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by myko on Monday May 07, 2012 @09:17PM (#3941724)

Of course in this case the person who wrote it is also the same person who copied it.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by fulafel on Tuesday May 08, 2012 @06:09AM (#3942963)

So you're saying that if I copy "for (i = 0; i < 100; i++)" then it's infringment, and there's no requirement of originality for copyright protection?

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by cullen on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @04:37PM (#3983904)

Oh dear, my freshmen are in a heap of trouble.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by __alexs on Tuesday May 08, 2012 @04:15AM (#3942732)

I thought the case was not even about copyright infringement of code but of the APIs i.e. the function names and arguments?

The OpenJDK is GPL'd after all, and well, an argument could be made that Google are infringing by distributing GPLd rangeCheck with the Apache license, Oracle aren't doing that afaik.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by ars on Tuesday May 08, 2012 @05:20AM (#3942849)

There is more than one issue. The big one of the API's, and a smaller issue of a very small amount of outright copying already admitted to by google.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by __alexs on Tuesday May 08, 2012 @08:33AM (#3943283)

If the Java APIs are copyrightable, which part of the OpenJDK GPL release doesn't provide Google with a GPL copyright license to them then?

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by polshaw on Monday May 07, 2012 @07:01PM (#3941354)

and how, generally, is this provable? (at least, to produce 'reasonable doubt' to a layman)

(ignoring that the guy seems to have said he copy-pasted here.)

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by ars on Monday May 07, 2012 @08:28PM (#3941590)

Why ignore it? That's exactly how.

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by emeraldd on Monday May 07, 2012 @04:07PM (#3940748)

Given a method signature, especially one with the parameter names, and a listing of the exceptions it could throw, I think the only thing I would do different would be comments and {} on the if's. I hate if's without braces, that's just asking for trouble in the future ;)

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by grandpoobah on Monday May 07, 2012 @08:39PM (#3941634)

But it makes the code prettier

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Re:Oracle/Google jury finds Google infringed SSO but hangs o... by fulafel on Tuesday May 08, 2012 @05:21AM (#3942852)

How can this snippet be copyrightable? Is there no requirement/threshold of originality in the US?

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