Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing

Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by mc808 on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @08:14AM (#9610771)

Neither one of those is substantial enough for copyright. They should be considered in the context of a whole body of work. Using books as an analogy, an API most closely resembles chapters and headings. Is it copyright infringement to write a new book that follows the same outline as a previous book? (I don't know...)

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Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by ChairmanZach on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @09:51AM (#9611296)

Not only do APIs resemble the chapters and headings of a book, they aslo include the contract that the content under those headings have exactly the same behaviour.

Google didn't just copy the "heading" java.lang.Math.max() they also copied the contract that calling this method should always return the bigger of the two arguments. Ergo, the "content" under the heading is the same, or rather the any differance between the content of Oracle's book and Google's book is irrelevant

As any programmer knows, you code against interfaces not implementations. And if you don't realize that declaring those interfaces take both effort and creativity then you probably aren't a very good programmer.

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Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by mc808 on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @10:49AM (#9611733)

A heading in a book is just as much a contract about the content as a method signature is about the content of a method. It takes effort and creativity to produce a coherent outline for a book.

And as any (competent) programmer knows, the "interface" in "code against interfaces not implementations" is merely a homonym of the "interface" in "application programming interface".

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Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by Oletros on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @10:35AM (#9611612)

> Google didn't just copy the "heading" java.lang.Math.max() they also copied the contract that calling this method should always return the bigger of the two arguments.

Irrelevant, the contract is not part of the trial

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Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by Ygg2 on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @10:41AM (#9611667)

Sure, some interfaces took time to develop. But most are obvious from a simplistic use case.

If any language has a function max that takes two integer values and doesn't return bigger, that language isn't worth bothering.

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Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by username3 on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @10:11AM (#9611416)

Search results resemble chapters and headings. Are search results protected by copyrights?

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Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by mc808 on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @11:27AM (#9612040)

I would hope not but wouldn't be surprised if they are, at least in the presentation. The ranking and selection of snippets are original but ultimately machine-generated content, so I could see a court leaning either way.

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Re:Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in sur... by shit_parade2 on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @09:44AM (#9611254)

Spoiler: no it's not.

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