The Supreme Court has agreed to review one of the decade’s most significant software copyright decisions: last year’s ruling by an appeals court that Google infringed Oracle’s copyrights when Google created an independent implementation of the Java programming language.
The 2018 ruling by the Federal Circuit appeals court “will upend the longstanding expectation of software developers that they are free to use existing software interfaces to build new computer programs,” Google wrote in its January petition to the Supreme Court.
In a sane world, this idiotic ruling would be overturned and Larry Ellison cries in his huge pile of money. Sadly, this world is far from sane, so this could really go either way.
How ironic, that Google should talk about some group’s “expectation” to get fair and reasonable treatment from a corporate entity. Is there a way they can both lose this case?
that sounds petty to me. in this particular case, google’s win is in everyone’s best interest.
Yeah, that’s how we got here in the first place. The previous court decided the bigger company had to be wrong, ignoring the implications to all the smaller companies such a ruling would have. A case should never be ruled on by how big or small the entities involved are. That virtually always hurts nearly everyone in the end.
The new hirings of benevolent Donald Trump have brought some sense into the SCOTUS, so I have great trust in them to overturn the mad decision.
This but unironically.
LOL, but at least they have pre-conceived position on this that I know off.
I’m not sure if your joking because above all else the conservatives will side with money, and that means 5-4 the decision stands with Oracle winning.
There is money on both sides, and Google is the richer of the two. They might side with Oracle if it was a very conservative company but it isn’t.
The Democrats are the biggest fluffers of “the copyright holder” in US politics, so I trust Republican judges to be more impartial than Democrat judges. Let’s not forget that DVD menus and Blu-Ray menus rely on APIs, and the Hollywood studios (long-time darlings of the Democrat party) would love to knock all free software DVD and Bluray players (even ones without decryption capabilities) out of the US market and out of US-based Desktop Linux distros, so nobody can play even decrypted discs without buying a “licensed” player.
At least with Republican judges, we have hope. Let’s hope sanity prevails. Though I somewhat doubt it. Copyright and patent issues in the US are usually judged according to whoever the judge thinks is the “good guy” and who is “the villain”. So all Oracle has to do is convince the judges that Google somehow “stole Java” from them to win.
Well – this could be how the Internet ends. Not with a whimper but a bang.. of a Supreme Court gavel..
LOL, yes. It’s going to be a nuclear winter, and we’re going back to the stoneage.
An adverse ruling by the supremes would be bad, but not catastrophic. Programmers would either pay a fee for every API they use (larger companies would pass this fee on to the customer), or they’d migrate to languages/libraries whose authors have used licenses that allow the programmers to use the APIs for free. Why do you think there’s been such a boom in the last five years or so on new languages? Especially spearheaded by Google? They’re covering their rears just in case the supremes have a brain fart. In the long run, it would spell the end of languages that weren’t free, like Oracle’s Java. They’ve just got executives who are too stupid/greedy to see they’re just killing themselves.
JLF65,
IMHO it could be catastrophic. If the legal environment becomes favorable for suing over API copyrights, that could promote a “land grab” to copyright all sensible APIs much as what is happening with patents. We could see the rise of API copyright trolls with lawyers sending cease and desist requests and demanding royalty payments to developers. As is often the case the legal disputes, the disparity between litigation capabilities of the parties will mean the little guys cannot get a fair fight and this will become yet another mechanism by which the courts themselves are used as pawns to cripple competition. Give that copyrights, unlike patents, can last over a century, the potential damages could be immense.
This all may seem silly now, but a poor supreme court ruling could open the doors to this sort of thing.
I won’t even attempt a prediction. I just know the potential ramifications could be huge.
The judge in the last federal case made a grave error because there is no natural limit to the number of times an API can be reimplemented and IMHO it’s totally counter-productive for the law to artificially limit an unlimited resource. With patents, they created an artificial monopoly to create an incentive to invent things. I feel patents have overstayed their usefulness, but even to someone who believes in software patents, the argument in favor of granting exclusive legal monopolies on ideas does not carry over to APIs. No incentives are needed to create APIs since APIs are never the end product, The incentive to develop an API is intrinsic to the end product with no additional government handouts necessary.
Times like this I wish Groklaw still was a thing.