Because infringement of the language and key libraries is how Oracle's
claim
is described in much of the commentary we see in Groklaw, when Oracle's
claim
evolved to a final state which is that infringement took place of
the
documentation of the language, to wit, the names of 37 packages, their
classes,
and their methods and signatures. Yes, the language is an idea as are
what the
methods do, but the written documentation is a tangible expression of
those
ideas. The language cannot be infringed, but the documentation could
be.
Google's defense would be that it
took the info not from Oracle's documentation
but Apache's documentation of
Harmony. Another Google defense is that the names
are not protectable, they
didn't take all the packages in modern java, that
looking at names and
independently writing implementation code and the
documentation of their
apis, which are a superset to the ones Oracle is suing
over, constitutes fair use.
Google did address those issues with their
filings and questions of
witnesses. We have a lot of folks down here
commenting who are
applying the rules for applications to
simulating parts of
a language by replicating the name choices made by
another creator
as
documented in the specifications and api listings, and it's not a clean fit,
just
as sheet music or books or dictionaries
are also not perfect and guiding
analogies. This is why the Judge is letting the
jury find
facts while he
pursues getting the law, heretofore not on point for the
circumstances here,
correct by asking tough questions of both parties and
looking at precedents in
related cases.
That's the way I look at it. I also suspect that taking
only the names from
Oracle's java, though
we are talking about over a thousand
nouns and verbs, is non-infringing. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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