Google To Pay $0 To Oracle In Copyright Case 250
An anonymous reader writes "In a hearing in the US District Court today, it was determined that Google will pay a net total of nothing for Oracle's patent claims against them. In fact, Google is given 14 days to file an application for Oracle to pay legal fees to Google (in a similar manner to how things are done for frivolous lawsuits). However, it is not quite peaches and roses for Google, as Oracle is planning on appealing the decision in the case.'"
Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope they get a few more if they keep appealing.
Re: (Score:2)
How many coding judges USA have?
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Funny)
Considering that Larry Ellison is buying himself a frikking island, perhaps the slap in the face finally pushed him into super-villainy...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/larry-ellisons-island-ora_n_1614130.html [huffingtonpost.com]
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
...so he decided to sell to freaking Ellison?!? Yeah, that'll end well.
New Headquarters (Score:4, Funny)
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So will the new Oracle headquarters be inside the vulcano on Lanai? Next thing you know, he'll be putting lasers on the moon.
Or on his sharks. Maybe even make: LAWYER SHARKS WITH FREAKING LAZERS ATTACHED TO THEIR HEAD! Let's see a judge deny him his monies then.
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Aren't lawyers already sharks? Only missing the lasers though.
Ztimulated? (Score:5, Informative)
"Laser" is a fucking acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation"
Until "Ztimulated" is a word, stop throwing a "z" in there, you fucking kumquat!
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At the same time we should do away with the common misconception that they go "PEW PEW PEW".
Re:Ztimulated? (Score:5, Funny)
At the same time we should do away with the common misconception that they go "PEW PEW PEW".
while in reality, they go "FOO FOO FOO" and the people they hit go "BAR BAR BAR".
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So will the new Oracle headquarters be inside the vulcano on Lanai? Next thing you know, he'll be putting lasers on the moon.
Not yet, but there are arrays of corner reflectors on the moon if you want to try out yours.
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that'll end well.
According to the pattern, he will buy the thing, and then go behind those who support and use it, and sue them.
Then sue everyone else who lives on an island because the docks look the same - one end in deep water and the other on the island.
Re:Oracle (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18529739 [bbc.co.uk]
only 98% of the island of Lanai thou , the plan was for Google to pay for the other 2% but things didn't quite work out...
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18529739 [bbc.co.uk]
only 98% of the island of Lanai thou , the plan was for Google to pay for the other 2% but things didn't quite work out...
check Google Maps.... the island Is crawling with Street View... and in high definition.
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Funny)
perhaps the slap in the face finally pushed him into super-villainy...
I think he has been there for years.
It's just one more purchase in a long line of super villiany like purchases. Think about it. Yachts, Islands, massive Data Centers. It's like he decided to purchase everything he ever saw a James Bond villain have.
I wonder if he has a white cat....
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
Can someone explain to me how the price for 98 percent of a Hawaiian island was only between 500 million and 700 million? I know next to nothing about real estate out there except that I know it's expensive as hell to own even a shack on a tiny plot of land. Is the particular island just not part of the "Hawaiian experience" us mainlanders are led to think about when we hear about that series of tropical islands?
It isn't now. (Score:3)
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Informative)
Vocab Nazi strikes again! (Score:3)
and are in a hurricane zone.
The storm termed a hurricane in the Atlantic is called a cyclone in the Indian ocean and a typhoon in the pacific. So it is not a hurricane zone but a typhoon zone. Zing!
[Karma burning irrelevant piece of trivia brought to you by The Vocab Nazi]
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Please turn in your Vocab Nazi card at the nearest Nazi Card Collection Center.
Lanai is located east of the International Date Line, at 20.833333 N, -156.933333 W [google.com]. The name "typhoon" is reserved for a tropical cyclone in the Northwest Pacific Ocean (i.e. west of the International Date Line). See http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/A1.html [noaa.gov] for more details.
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What a slap in the face... but one Oracle desperately needed.
I doubt that Larry "Big Swinging Dork" Ellison learned a thing.
Re:Oracle (Score:5, Informative)
Previous rulings are viewed as the starting point for appeals, and it's up to Oracle to try and prove why that ruling was flawed. Especially in a case like this, where a higher judge is much less likely to understand the matter, they'll treat Alsup's judgment very highly and are unlikely to overrule it.
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Re:Oracle (Score:4, Funny)
and yet only a small step from "6 billion dollars", huh.
Oracle has screwed up so badly even their lawyers are looking horrible.
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These are the same lawyers that shredded MS in the antitrust case, and then lost their bowels in SCO vs sanity. Seeing your username I think you knew that, but I wanted to point out the interesting history for others. I strongly suspect that Boies will modify their terms of engagement before taking on new clients in the future...
Re:Oracle (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it was BSF, but they also had hired the MoFos [mofo.com] (and, no, that's not a joke domain, it's legit).
The MoFos trashed BSF in the SCO/Novell suit.
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I do recall :) They certainly seem to skirt proper court conduct though, as in this case and in the SCO case they have been warned by judges of bad conduct constantly. I wonder if something changed prior to the SCO case?
Re:Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)
Given how close that figure is to the amount that Oracle paid for Sun, I guarantee you that before Oracle bought Sun, someone doing analysis of potential take over targets shortlisted Sun based on the Java IP. I'll bet that they thought it was a slam dunk that Sun could have won an IP lawsuit against Google and that made them an ideal takeover target since they have what Oracle would call an underutilized asset in the Java IP.
Which of course is a massive miscalculation, but then again most corporate acquisitions turn out to be massive miscalculations.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oracle (Score:4, Informative)
and yet only a small step from "6 billion dollars", huh.
Oracle has screwed up so badly even their lawyers are looking horrible.
Oracle's lawyers already looked horrible before the suit even started. Remember, these guys represented SCO. I guess shame is not a word in David Boies' vocabulary.
Cute (Score:5, Funny)
Weird ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not clueless.
They know damn well what they are doing.
Remember, this is the same legal environment that packed the DOJ with ex-RIAA attorneys.
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Um, Obama and Biden did that. Not the "legal environment."
I'm not a fan of the republicans either, who pack the DoJ with guys with other agendas, but the first step is to assign responsibility to the correct parties here.
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Actually, the RIAA and the "clueless"-ness are simply both symptoms of corruption.
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you please STFU about the RIAA? It has nothing to do with this other than to get groupthink fucks to agree with you. These are the same types of fucks who don't know a speeding ticket from a subpoena.
Actually, it has quite a bit to do with it.
The point is that the legal system is broken, not clueless, because the people involved in the deciding part (judges, DOJ) have conflicting interests due to their associations with current/former clients.
That's why Oracle gets a much different result than Apple in the legal system. Not actual logic, ethics, or law, but who you know and where they used to work for.
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It seems to me that this time it had to do with a judge that wasn't a total f'ing tech-dunce. He did his homework, he knew the score, and he called "bullshit". No doubt the bajillion dollars worth of representation on Google's side helped.
If you wore a fancy suit and told my otherwise smart-enough grandmother that the intarwebs pirate rapists were costing you a quintillion dollars a day (with all the professionally printed charts to go with it), and the accused was a soccer mom with an 18 year old law sch
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it a weird ruling?
It's one of the most sane rulings to come down the pike.
The other rulings that shock the conscience are the weird rulings.
--
BMO
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Apple's patents fall into two major categories: "design patents" that cover appearance, and UI innovations that come about because Apple has done a good job of pushing the frontiers of the user experience.
"Rounded corners" and such are an example of the design patents, and that is a whole different category from technology patents like the ones on Java. Does not apply; moving on.
Apple's UI innovation patents, as far as it seems to me (a non-lawyer), are mostly about doing something that hasn't been done before and trying to patent as much of it as possible. Some of these patents are bogus (IMHO the pinch-zoom gesture is an obvious thing to do if you have a multitouch display, so shouldn't be patentable) but some of these might not be bogus.
On the other hand, the Java patents were really weak. The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) was hardly the first VM ever; the UCSD "p-System" VM is over three decades old, so Sun couldn't patent the basic idea of a VM to let programs run anywhere. So they patented a few aspects of Java, and then Oracle claimed in court that the Dalvik VM infringed those patents. But I've read several analyses of these patents, and they pretty much agreed that the patents were weak. It seems the court agreed.
Finally, why should Google pay Oracle? Google is using a different VM, all new and all original code. Google isn't using the Java trademark, and doesn't have any agreement with Oracle. As people have observed here on Slashdot: If you want to argue that Oracle "owns" Java so completely that nobody may copy it, then maybe the creators of the C programming language and the C standard library could collect staggering royalties from pretty much the whole world.
Google making Dalvik over the objections of Oracle is just like Dodge making a car over the objections of Ford. You can see why there might be objections, but society shouldn't interfere.
steveha
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Pinch-to-Zoom was invented at a public university on public funding [examiner.com] and therefore it ought to belong to The People.
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
It blows my mind that Google can use a fairly complete Java clone over Oracles objections and pay nothing...
Perhaps, the case would have been a little bit different if Sun had not open sourced Java in the first place.
Also, it wasn't against Oracle's objections. You've got to remember that Oracle didn't even own Java at the time Google cloned it. Sun owned it and Sun had no problems with Google cloning it. So it's not like Oracle can even claim it was a victim in all of this, it wasn't.
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In the case of Google vs Oracle, you had an American judge with 2 American companies, so the case was judged on its merits.
In the case of Apple vs Samsung you had an American judge with Apple (American) and Samsung (Korean). The case does not appear to have been judged on its merits (as I am fairly sure Apple didn't really invent the rectangle).
Call me a troll if you wish but this is how we (the rest of the World) understands these cases to be judged.
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It blows my mind that Google can use a fairly complete Java clone over Oracles objections and pay nothing, while Apple sues people's socks off for making tablets shaped like rounded rectangles
I suspect that if Apple had sued Google over rounded corners they would have had their ass handed to them.
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I think PsyStar would disagree that Apple hasn't won any copyright cases.
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It was also a DMCA violating because PsyStar circumvented the technological protection measures in OSX.
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OSX contains checks inside parts of the OS (e.g. windowing system) to verify that its running on legitimate apple hardware. (or at least it did last time I heard about it). That to me would count as a "technological protection measure" under the DMCA.
The fact that Apple didn't use the DMCA in court doesn't necessarily mean that what Pystar did isn't a DMCA violation.
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Ever look at the contents of /System/Library/Extensions/Dont\ Steal\ Mac\ OS\ X.kext/ ?
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That was about customization of MacOS in non Apple Machines and Apple's abusive EULA. PsyStar bough licenses from Apple and used them in a way that broke the EULA. It had nothing to do with copyright.
IANAL... but it seems to me a EULA draws its legal basis from copyright laws (like in "I'm giving you this piece of copyrighted work - in this case MacOS - and you agree to do with it as per EULA"). Pretty much the same as BSD/Apache/GPL/whatever open source license does.
You're sure PsyStar case has nothing to do with copyright?
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yes, I am pretty sure the case wasn't about copyright, patents or anything remotely associated with suing someone for making a product in the same shape as yours.
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EULA is a contract. It draws its legals base from an agreement between the parts involved. Certainly one of the parts needs to have some rights over whatever is being used by the other (be it copyright, ownership, etc), but to break the EULA you don't need to violate these rights, which was exactly what happened in PsyStar's case.
PsyStar didn't copy Apple's product, they bought every one of the licenses they used. They didn't violate any copyright from Apple, but still they didn't obey the EULA they have agreed upon when they licensed the software.
Thanks. +Insightful
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Can you enter into a contract just by buying something? Isn't it true that EULAs have never really been tested in court?
The way I know, in civil laws, what it is not forbidden, then it is allowed. If that's true, then the fact that EULA hasn't been tested in a court as a contract (much less ruled that it is not), it means it is allowed to act as a contract.
(If you're right, then Apple/Psystar is an example, maybe I'll have to read more about this.) Can I sell you a book with an attached EULA that says you may only read it in a blue rocking chair, and if you violate that you have to give the book back with no refund, and you agree to the contract merely by purchasing the book?
By purchasing the software (by extension, a book would fall under the same) with a shrinkwrap [wikipedia.org] license that doesn't allow you to read its terms: it seems the precedents indicate it is not enforceable [wikipedia.org].
But if you have had the occasion to read the license before buying it and
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Can you enter into a contract just by buying something?
Buying something IS a contract! At it's most basic level it is an agreement to exchange physical items or services.
Yep, but having the audactity to treat a judge like a fool by attempting to enforce it in court would likely backfire and do serious damage to your bank account.
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Re:Weird ruling (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see why not. In very basic terms, a contract has three components:
Offer (I offer to let you use this software I wrote)
Consideration (in exchange for which you will do something eg. Give me money, agree not to copy it and give copies away, agree that if you change the source you must also give the source away)
Acceptance (you agree to these terms)
I'm pretty sure acceptance can be inferred from action; it does not require signing a piece of paper. The only difficulty I see is that the contract isn't revealed until after you buy the item, which generally you can't return. I don't know how this would pan out in the real world.
Usual IANAL caveats apply.
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No, Psystar was found to be violating Apple's base copyrights. They weren't installing directly from the disks, they had copied the software to an imaging server, so each installation was considered to be an unauthorized copy.
Apple's case was brought on copyright, EULA, patents, trademarks, and I believe the DMCA. The judge gave them a total victory on all counts IIRC. Psystar wasn't exactly the greatest test case.
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Informative)
After full briefing and oral argument, Psystar was found liable for infringement of Apple's copyrights in Mac OS X by violating Apple's exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works (Dkt. No. 214 at 10). Psystar was also found liable for contributory copyright infringement by intentionally inducing and encouraging its customers to directly infringe Apple's copyrights through its sale of unauthorized copies of Mac OS X to the public (Id. at 10). 1 Finally, Psystar was found liable for violating Sections 1201(a)(1), 1201(a)(2), and 1201(b)(1) of the DMCA for circumvention and trafficking in circumvention devices (Id. at 13-14). Each of Psystar's asserted defenses were rejected as either waived or without merit.
Re:Weird ruling (Score:4, Funny)
fanboyism
We certainly wouldn't want any of that.
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Remove the logos and brandnames from most laptops and I bet the same sort of lawyers won't be able to tell which laptop was made by which manufacturer.
Heck I know people who don't know the model or even brand of cars they are using. They just know the colour.
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So, I would take that whole thing with a grain of salt.
Re:Weird ruling (Score:4, Informative)
And yet many judges have decided that Samsung did not violate Apple's designs, starting with Apple's opening salvo in the Netherlands. Apple's design is of a rounded cornered rectangle with a display in the center (that's it). Any media device could be seen to violate it.
Apple is suing Samsung because they are their biggest competitor. Samsung outsold Apple in smartphones for 2011 by 5.5 million units and widened their lead in the first quarter of 2012 to 10 million more units (45 million to 35 million). Samsung has also made tablet inroads and are now the number two tablet company. Smartphones are the cash cow of both Apple and Samsung. Apple's marketshare in smartphones has fallen to 23% while Android has increased to 56%. This has to concern Apple.
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If anyone has a complete lack of understanding it's you.
Trade dress refers to distinctive aspects of a product or service that denote its source or origin. This could include the decor of a restaurant or the style of staff uniforms.
Design patents apply to the decorative aspects of a functional pro
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no, a patent is not on an idea.
a patent (at least, how they used to be) describes an invention. the invention is an implementation of an idea.
i hate to nitpick, but there's a difference between selling an invention and sitting at home going "i thought of that!" and whining that everyone steals your ideas when an idea cannot be owned unless you work to manifest it in the physical world.
the problem with the patent system is all the "...on a computer" rehashes of existing _ideas_ providing a loophole that all
Re:Weird ruling (Score:4, Interesting)
Code is math, in every and any way you can imagine. Everything that makes it LOOK like it isn't math is deliberate window dressing to allow non-mathematicians to do the math - but that's all it is, smoke and mirrors.
It's still really all just math. The act of programming is really just a more efficient way of counting to a number that suits your purposes.
If you know anything about computational theory you would realize that there isn't a single aspect of programming that is NOT in fact 100% pure maths.
The patent system is perfectly equipped to deal with things that are maths: it must exclude them from patent-ability.
Problem solved.
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Everything in the universe "is math". Do you think that levers and springs aren't math? They can be defined in terms of the axioms of physics and analyzed mathematically. A rotary engine is just as much "is math" as a software program. Can you not create a software simulator to predict the behavior of a rotary engine? The only difference is that software is easier mathematics in terms of current human capabilities.
If you tried to exclude things that were mathematically definable from the patent system,
Re:Weird ruling (Score:5, Informative)
There is a huge difference between "can be described mathematically" and "actually IS a mathematical formula".
Every computer program ever written IS a mathematical formula. It's not something that can be DESCRIBED by a mathematical formula (which is what you're talking about) - it is the formula ITSELF.
That's what programs are. You have fallen for the smoke and mirrors.
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Incorrect in that the product X is not a a mathematical formula. A computer program is a mathematical formula. All of them. No exceptions.
What is a computer program ? It is a mathematical formula. If you don't know that then you don't know how computers WORK. A computer program is the same thing as: 2+2=4
It's just a much more complicated one, but that's what a computer program is - it's what every computer program is.
In fact, it gets better, if you know computational theory then you know that a mathematical
A positive spin, according to expert Mueller (Score:5, Insightful)
It's incredible that expert Mueller still puts a positive spin on the case...from predicting "triple damages" to Oracle, to what he termed as the "smoking gun Lindholm email", to the general disdain of anything not sanctioned by his cronies.
When one visits his blog, you cannot fail to see the little coverage he accords news unfavorable to those who bankroll him.
Re:A positive spin, according to expert Mueller (Score:5, Funny)
If it is triple of $0, I think Google can afford it.
Out of curiosity... (Score:5, Funny)
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it would be worth it.
Obligatory: I don't think anyone will find Oracle (Score:5, Funny)
Appealing
Narcisissm (Score:3)
I think I know how this went down (Score:5, Funny)
Google: I'm going to write a figure on this piece of paper. It's not quite as large as the last one, but I think you'll find it fair.
Oracle's Lawyers: I think we should take it.
You dropped some zeroes there (Score:5, Funny)
Corporate lawsuits never involve such small numbers.
I believe you meant $00,000,000
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Why can't judges in these cases immediately rule "I pass" since we know they will always appeal and bribe things as far as possible.
Actually, I think in such cases the cost to tax payers should be paid for doing the appeal, or even the lawsuit itself (regardless of outcome.) I doubt it would amount to much of the legal expenses since their lawyers are way more expensive than use of the court room and judge's time. Why should tax payers fund these guys abusing our system? Its not like they actually pay thei
Obligatory. (Score:3)
Alright, who has Oracle's big pile of nothing... :)
Like? (Score:5, Funny)
Google is given 14 days to file an application for Oracle to pay legal fees to Google
Dammit... where is Slashdot's "like" button??
laymen... (Score:3, Funny)
This clearly show that the court is manned by laymen... they should have made the decision that the ammount should be null, not zero.
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Maybe they had a not null constraint on that (Oracle :)) database table, so zero was the correct token to use.
Seriously though, awarding Oracle zero damages is not the same as not awarding them damages at all. This recognizes that Oracle was "right" in the case, even if no material damage is caused. I would have preferred that the result be that Google was not liable for damages at all (even the nominal sum of zero - but I haven't read the legal summary, I could well be wrong and that is what the judgeme
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And while they're at it, they should declare software patents NULL and void too... though I'm not sure what compiler would accept such a mix of value and type.
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Declaring something void is certainly possible, at least when that something is the return type of a function. However, declaring something NULL would imply it having the type NULL, and in C NULL is a value, not a type.
Of course, in SQL you could say that you're declaring a column NULL (capable), but there you don't have "void".
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Bzzzt! That's not declaring software_patents NULL and void, that's declaring NULL to be a substitution macro for a void pointer of value zero. :)
It couldn't happen to nicer people (Score:2)
I COULD be mistaken, but didn't sun open source java before oracle bought them. If so, wouldn't it invalidate the claim, as google would have a prior license.
Oracle wanted $6Billion -- Judge chopped one digit (Score:3, Funny)
Hopefully it will never be patented.
Patents versus copyright (Score:4, Informative)
The article says the suit was about whether the APIs could be patented. That is not so - the suit was about whether the APIs could be copyrighted. The article author probably has no idea what he is talking about.
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Oracle wont be going out of business anytime soon, too many people use their database products and middle-ware for that to happen.
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People said similar things about SCO at one point.
Re:Bad Article (Score:5, Informative)
it started on patents. when bullshit was called, it moved to copyright infringement of the headers.
that's the big problem - to not use a car analogy, think of a program as like a giant recipe. the code is the method, the headers are the ingredients list. Oracle wanted to assert imaginary copyright on the lists of ingredients for Java.
i use the food analogy because food recipes are not copyrightable. you can steal all the recipes from all the cookbooks and publish them yourself and be perfectly fine, so long as you don't copy the photos or pontificating between recipes.
also note that cookbooks sell very very well in spite of this.
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extending the analogy, i suppose Oracle could assert copyright on the comments in the code. the only problem there is they'd almost certainly not be the same unless google had access to Sun's source tree back in the day.
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Software patents are kind of dumb, though, because it's awfully hard to think of a series of programming lines as non-obvious.
Some software is definitely non-obvious — compression and encryption code are excellent examples — and those are cases where software patents actually make sense. Except that they've been around for long enough that very often the patents will have actually expired...
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Just mixing unusual ingredients wouldn't be enough for a patent though. You would have to come up with some new process of cooking, like freeze drying or liquid nitrogen baths or infusing the food with liquid oxygen and lighting it at the customer's table so it cooks in a few milliseconds and spreads itself around the room a bit.
Re:Bad Article (Score:5, Informative)
It was a two part trial. One part was on copyright infringement and the other part was on patent infringement. The outcome was that Google violated Oracle copyrights on 9 lines of code (out of 15 million) and some test cases. Google was not found to have infringed on any Oracle patents. The judge decided that the damages amounted to $0 for the copyright violations. Oracle can appeal.
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Oracle was also suing over the use of two patents.
The jury ruled that no patent infringement occurred.
Then the judge ruled that APIs weren't copyrightable.
Which left Oracle with only the jury's ruling that the Rangecheck() function was used in violation of copyright.
Which was what the $0 award was for - Google's use of rangecheck....