n Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Neil Brown <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On 21 Oct 2014, at 18:26, Robinson Tryon <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > I don't get the point of discussing the linguistic intricacies at the > same time as discussing the legal points without pointing out up-front > that the word choice is likely to be viewed as inflammatory. > > > My recollection was that thufir did point out at the very beginning that > s/he was using the words of the judgment, rather than his/her own choice of > words: > > "It's remarkable that the trial judge and the appeal judge use > a word like stolen, and not "infringe" or other legal mumbo jumbo." > > > > > thanks for noting that, Neil. Was Alsup intending to setup a straw-man argument? I don't think so, I think he was genuinely trying to answer that question. I can only speculate, but I'm guessing that he considered this possibility after arriving at his decision and was then considering what the ramifications would be. It's more than ironic that the appeals court, to my mind, wrote a decision which would actually protect open source, publicly available GPL software. The only real-world consequences of upholding Alsup's reasoning would be that any sufficiently popular GPL protected software will eventually get the same treatment and end up under the ASL. Theoretically, it could be any software, and, theoretically, it could be made totally closed-source, proprietary, but I don't see that happening. My understanding is, and I know Luke disagrees violently, is that SSO is a *useful* shorthand for API. The appeals write about SSO in the context of an API, that an API has a SSO. No one, not the appeals court, not the original Judge, Alsup, have ever suggested copyrighting an actual API. I would ask and encourage not to consider the advisability of "copyrighting an API," but: what would've forced, or would force the next time, Google to have used the GPL? -Thufir
