These corporate v. corporate cases aren't as clear cut. It's not like: Aha!!!! You breached copyright! Off with his head!
So let's look at the practical breaches here: (A) It's a decompile and rewrite of the header, for code that has been public, and free, for years now. Someone has to show damages and its kind of difficult to see what kind of damages Oracle is going to claim here. Furthermore, this stuff has NEVER been rolled out into android phones which is nice, because it means an order by a judge that google makes this stuff unaccessible right now is more or less easy for google to do (they'll need to call a total freeze on their repo as wiping these files from the entire repo history means the ids change, and with that, all clones and such run out of sync). (B) Its a zip file that absolutely nobody uses and was clearly checked in by accident (i.e. the same stuff as above applies), _AND_ it wasn't checked in by google. Insofar as a judge will take intent into consideration, that's pretty much all aces for google, and again I don't see how Oracle can claim significant damages here. Also not rolled out to android phones and thus any order by a judge to stop distribution is as trivial as the previous one. There's a set fee for a single breach, which is high for individuals, but peanuts to google (something well below a million dollars). Possibly they have to pay that, if the judgement swings oracle's way on the copyright stuff, but it won't go any further. As google can essentially buy off the copyright claim and thus strip it from the much more interesting case, it practically means a big loss for Oracle: They have to amend their case from "google screwed us by using these 8 patents without a license AND they copied a bunch of code from us illegally" to just "They screwed us with these 8 unlicensed patents". Also note that accidental checking in / rewriting copyright header is fairly common in open source projects and thus all the various legal entities that are friends of FOSS will back google at least on the copyright claims, if it comes to that. Specifically, any push by Oracle to somehow attempt to equate to massive copyright infringement the following: the accidental check-in of freely available but not BSD-compatible source in a repo as a file that isn't actually used or distributed other than via the source repo. Would certainly cause me a near heart attack, and I'm sure it'll do similar: Who the What now?!?!!??? reactions in other FOSS repo maintainers. i.e.: Massive PR damage for Oracle and big backlash. Unless they successfully manage to fake out the greater tech populace again by claiming this is all part of a much bigger move. Sure, it is, but that doesn't give Oracle an excuse, in my opinion, to use legal tactics that would actually work just as well on loads of innocuous (open source) projects. Once Oracle tests these silly tricks in court and they hold up, we're all screwed. So, for the sake of open source, I continue to believe Oracle should massively lose. Even if you ascribe to the theory that google is doing incalculable damage to the java brand and "Write Once, Run Anywhere" concept, this holds, because open source is more important than java. NB: The usual I'm Not A Lawyer disclaimer applies. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
