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Yes! No! Wait! But!... I'm so confused. For the love of ADA! | 451 comments | Create New Account
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Yes! No! Wait! But!... I'm so confused. For the love of ADA!
Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 06:50 AM EDT
From ADA, in the story:
So too with a taxonomy-of butterflies, legal citations, or dental procedures.   Facts do not supply their own principles of organization.   Classification is a creative endeavor.   Butterflies may be grouped by their color, or the shape of their wings, or their feeding or breeding habits, or their habitats, or the attributes of their caterpillars, or the sequence of their dna;  each scheme of classification could be expressed in multiple ways.
However, if the SSO already exists as a fact, any expression of that fact is not protectable. Classification of the Beatles performance as Pop/Rock/ is a choice of the author and may be sufficiently creative to be protectable.

The SSO in the Java API Specification is just fact and is unprotectable. However, the judge has pointed out in the jury instructions that the protected SSO is in the actual Java API compilable code and not in the Specification.

There is a chicken and egg situation, here. Here is Astrachan's sample program: package Simple;

// @author: aulut [or whatever his username is]
public class WebReader {
....public static void Main(string [] arg) {
....java.net.URL site = new java.net.URL("http://cnn.com/");
........java.io.inputstream source = site.OpenStream();
........system.out.print(source.read());
....}
}
We know that the API is implemented in Java. Any methods invoked in a class library must use the dotty path. The SSO grew as the API grew and there must have been unimplemented placeholders in the SSO in order that the APIs could be written. (I assume that there was a sketch API to start with and that the starting APIs were written in byte-code - but, what would I know!).

So, sometimes the SSO is a function of fact and sometimes it is creative expression depending on what was put in place first during the API development.

Putting all this together, one can clearly see that...

No, I'm done!

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

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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