decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Judge Alsup Decides He, Not the Jury, Will Decide the Issue of API Copyrightability ~pj | 503 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Judge Alsup Decides He, Not the Jury, Will Decide the Issue of API Copyrightability ~pj
Authored by: jbb on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 01:08 AM EDT
The aforementioned APIs are already made available under Apache-2 in Harmony.

Jonathon Schwartz:

[a]nybody else who wanted to go create their own runtime, whether it was Apache Harmony or GNU Classpath, was free to do so; they just couldn't call it Java.
Why shouldn't Google have derived their implementation from this? As far as OpenJDK was concerned, the conventional wisdom was that there were patent land mines buried in that code. Google would have been up against the same TCK problem since the terms of the TCK were the same. Almost everyone thought the danger was in patents, not in API copyrights. For that reason alone, GNU Classpath or Apache Harmony would be a better choice than OpenJDK if they wanted to respect Sun's IP rights.

Oracle has already admitted they are asking the judge to make "new law" regarding API copyrights. How was Google supposed to predict that Oracle would do something as hare-brained as that?

Look at the early coverage of this case in the tech media. Almost everyone was focused on the patent claims even though everyone knew Android was making use of Harmony and Java APIs (it was headline news back when Android was released in November of 2007). If the people covering this case believed APIs could be copyrighted then the API claims would have been much bigger news than the patent claims. If people in the pro-Oracle camp (paid or otherwise) believed APIs could be copyrighted then their headlines would have been screaming about APIs, not about patents. The API claims would have been a slam-dunk for Oracle (except for estoppel and laches and all that stuff).

Oracle pulled these API claims out of their hat with no legal precedents. They admit they are asking the judge to change how the law works. Yet somehow Google was supposed to predict this? Even with all the smart people that work there, not even Google is that clever.

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Judge Alsup Decides He, Not the Jury, Will Decide the Issue of API Copyrightability ~pj
Authored by: tknarr on Monday, April 23 2012 @ 03:39 AM EDT

Because if Google used the OpenJDK as the basis for Dalvik, they'd have the GPLv2 terms to contend with. They wanted one where they could use it as the basis without having to license the results only under the terms of the parent. The Apache license allowed that, the GPLv2 doesn't. From Google's POV, the Apache license gives them much more flexibility in what they do with Dalvik and how they do it.

NB: I don't think anyone who contributed to Harmony has any grounds for complaint here. The Apache license was derived from BSD license terms, and those terms were chosen specifically to allow this flexibility. If I contribute to a project I've done so knowing what the terms will be, and if someone comes along and does something with my code that those terms were designed to allow then whether I like it or not I've no right to gripe at them about it.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )