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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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