U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Oracle API Case

Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by andrewguenther on Monday June 29, 2015 @06:36PM (#9801628)

Unfortunately this was a terrible case to have been the first of its kind (in the US). There was much more at play here than API copyright. Google didn't just copy the Java APIs, but it took the syntax as well. Oracle also presented evidence that Google had directly copied implementation of a few API functions, which Google actually admitted was true, but claimed it to be negligible. While all of these claims were examined separately, all of them combined made it much harder for any individual victory.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by Oletros on Monday June 29, 2015 @06:40PM (#9801644)

One 9 lines function, nothing more was copied.

The only other thing were 7 test files that were not part of the implementation

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by spinlock on Monday June 29, 2015 @06:47PM (#9801675)

So you admit that there was copying. /s

But, in all seriousness, the 9 lines + 7 files are damning. It also shows that the engineers who implemented Google's project had been tainted by exposure to Java.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by NeutronBoy on Monday June 29, 2015 @07:03PM (#9801744)

> But, in all seriousness, the 9 lines + 7 files are damning. It also shows that the engineers who implemented Google's project had been tainted by exposure to Java.

I think that's one of the key points. How can you claim a clean-room implementation, when there are (small) portions that have been directly copied? It weakens the case for the rest of the code.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by Zigurd on Monday June 29, 2015 @09:52PM (#9802393)

Android uses code from Apache Harmony for many basic Java classes. If any code was copied from Java 6, it would have happened in the Harmony project.

Android's use of Java also ends in the toolchain. Android never used a Java(tm) runtime, nor Java bytecode in the runtime. by the time an app hits a device, it's in Dalvik bytecode and either interpreted/JIT-compiled by the Dalvik runtime or pre-compiled to the target system ISA for the ART runtime.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by Oletros on Monday June 29, 2015 @07:10PM (#9801785)

Nobody claimed a clean room implementation because it had nothing to do with the case

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by dd9990 on Monday June 29, 2015 @08:10PM (#9802037)

It's more interesting than that. The engineer who wrote those 9 lines was employed by Sun working on Java APIs before working for Google. According to his testimony it was a "fix later" copy/paste mistake he made when improving Sun's OpenJDK code while working for Google.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by Oletros on Monday June 29, 2015 @07:09PM (#9801784)

Implementation was never a problem in this case

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by cheald on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @05:06PM (#9808422)

9 lines copied by the guy who wrote the original implementation, let's not forget. This was literally a case of him saying "oh, I've done this trivial thing before, I'll just grab what I did then".

This whole thing is a travesty.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by andrewguenther on Monday June 29, 2015 @06:45PM (#9801667)

Correct. But it was still copied and it still didn't help their case.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by bitmapbrother on Monday June 29, 2015 @07:30PM (#9801866)

Yes, it was copied by the original author that wrote it back when he was employed at Sun. Additionally, those 9 insignificant lines were irrelevant to the case. The fact that it was even presented showed how desperate Oracle was.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by carussell on Monday June 29, 2015 @09:14PM (#9802230)

> Google didn't just copy the Java APIs, but it took the syntax as well.

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean, and I don't see anyone else asking. So could you explain?

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by andrewguenther on Monday June 29, 2015 @09:44PM (#9802360)

Google didn't want to pay licensing fees to Oracle so they wrote their own implementation of the entire Java language. Not only did they write their own implementation of the standard library, they wrote their own compiler and virtual machine. Does that make sense? I can see how my original statement was unclear.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by carussell on Monday June 29, 2015 @10:22PM (#9802496)

I'm familiar with the background of the case, I just don't understand what you mean by, "took the syntax as well". Android programs are written in Java-the-language. That fact neither enlarges nor diminishes the severity of Google's actions here.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by Hello71 on Monday June 29, 2015 @07:29PM (#9801859)

this is true, but will always be true for every court case. by definition, cases that reach the Supreme Court are those that are the most difficult to decide; if one side would/should clearly win, then the parties would virtually always settle much earlier or even avoid court in the first place.

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Re:U.S. Supreme Court Denies Google's Request to Appeal Orac... by andrewguenther on Monday June 29, 2015 @09:41PM (#9802346)

Agreed, I'm saying that if this was a case purely around API copyright-ability and not all the other hairy bits around it, it would have made for a nicer case to set precedence.

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