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
The contract did not help, this time. | 451 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The contract did not help, this time.
Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 02:02 PM EDT
Oracle (Sun) joined in a legal contract with Apache in the JCP, Java
Specification Participation Agreement once the agreement had been extended to
give permission for third party implementation of the API Specification. Oracle
(Oracle) were also a party to the agreement.

One assumes that the JSPA would not have had small print saying that Harmony
could implement the Specification, but there was no licence for anyone to use
the implementation!

There must have been tacit agreement among the whole JCP membership, including
Sun and Oracle, that Apache could licence the Apache implementation under the
Apache licence or else Apache would not have joined the JCP and Sun would not
have let them.

Now, this.

The GPL can only be offered by the copyright holder. I would want to see how the
OpenJDK was released under the GPL but, if each class is released as an
independent GPL file (as it has to be for Java technical reasons) then I cannot
see how Oracle can stop Google from using and redistributing all the 51 that
they need. Copyright is copyright and the licence is the licence.

Oracle would find it very hard to assert a compilation work or a collective work
copyright over the whole 166 and claim that using one quarter is infringing on
those copyrights especially when they have licensed all the copyright creative
expression in all of the files under the GPL. They know that the GPL, which they
chose as a licence, prohibits any further limitations. If they wanted further
limitations then they should not have chosen the GPL.

Mind you, that is, more or less, just what they have got away with in this case.
Each API class compilable code file is an independent file with its own
copyright. The judge is allowing Oracle to assert copyright over a compilation
of thousands upon thousands of individual copyright files. It is a complete
nonsense. No wonder the jury does not know what to make of it.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ 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 )