On 14-10-18 08:11 AM, lkcl . wrote:
On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 6:26 AM, thufir <[email protected]> wrote:
On 14-10-17 03:52 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
you would no longer be permitted to utilise or work on the Firefox
Web Browser, because it has implemented a near-identical copy of the
Microsoft COM protocol named XPCOM (badly, it has to be said.
That's not at all what the appeals court wrote.
it may not explicitly be what was written, but what was explicitly
written is irrelevant. it's what's *implied* by what is written that
is important.
the appeals court explicitly writes:
'Though the trial court did add the caveat that it “does not hold that
the structure, sequence and organization of all computer programs may be
stolen,” Copyrightability Decision, 872 F. Supp. 2d at 1002, it is hard
to see how its method of operation analysis could lead to any other
conclusion.'
exactly because they're one step ahead of the argument you make, this is
all about the ramifications. They're not implying what the
ramifications might or might not be, they're explicitly stating what
they believe the ramifications to be. We don't need to infer when the
judges explicitly write about the larger ramifications.
and, from what i gather everyone is saying, the crux of the matter is
that APIs are to become copyrightable material.
due to the concept of case-law [precedent] i don't believe that the
judge may permit *only* 37 APIs to become copyrighted without also
setting a huge precedent of allowing *other people* to then quote the
exact same arguments and use this case as a reference.
i believe this is what case law is all about?
does that make it clear that this *REALLY IS* about copyrighting *ALL* APIs?
No, it doesn't make it clear at all because you're completely ignoring:
'As the former Register of Copyrights of the United States pointed out
in his brief amicus curiae, “[h]ad Google reverse engineered the
programming packages to figure out the ideas and functionality of the
original, and then created its own structure and its own literal code,
Oracle would have no remedy under copyright whatsoever.”'
The appeals court, right there, explicitly explains exactly how to
work-around copyright: reverse engineer the API's.
So, your concern that no one will be able to work on API's is unfounded
-- provided that the API's are reverse engineered. How is this any
different than the current situation?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but, when working on an API, whether it's WINE
or Apache Harmony, it's in the context of reverse engineering? Google
doesn't claim to have reverse engineered anything, nor do they make the
claim that they limited themselves to forking Apache Harmony. Reading
between the lines, they know that the copied so never claimed any
exemption on that basis...sorta.
Except that their justifications for copying are all based on reverse
engineering...confusing, to say the least.
Or, even better, hey why not just fork OpenJDK, trim it down, call it
OpenJDKThe37APIsForPhones, and release it under the GPL? That, to me,
would've been the best solution -- Google went a different direction.
However, to allow the SSO
apologies i have no idea what an "S S O" is - it's not a common
computing term that i've ever encountered in the past 38 years of
working with computers. would you mind providing a reference to this
acronym?
l.
SSO is legal jargon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization
I think, for the most part, it's safe to read "API" for "SSO" in the
context of Google, Java, Android and Oracle -- at least, that's my take.
Keep in mind that Apache Harmony, so far as I understand, was exactly as
described above: a clean room, reverse engineered implementation of
Java for the purposes of compatibility. They hit every note that the
appeals court asks.
I keep going back to purpose:
'Instead, Google chose to copy both the declaring code and the overall
SSO of the 37 Java API packages at issue.'
to me, that says it all. That's a strong statement that Google:
1.) copied, they didn't reverse engineer
2.) their purpose wasn't compatability
3.) dalvik isn't compatible -- going by footnote 15, at least. Also,
James Gosling.
Apache Harmony, quite notably, would've hit all three points where
Google missed. Now that OpenJDK is (mostly? completely?) under the GPL,
there's not much point in Apache Harmony; it's been dead for a while.
I'm not subscribed to fsfeurope, so...will my reply to them bounce?
-Thufir
