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in compilable code | 697 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
in compilable code
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 08 2012 @ 03:35 PM EDT
Source code minus comments.

So say oracle. Yet to actually see it.

Still the jury found a way to agree.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Isn't Java API Documentation machine generated
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 08 2012 @ 05:19 PM EDT

The bottom line: no infringement. Did Sun and Oracle have a copyright on the documentation they publish, some of it in books and e-books, and some of it on web pages? Yes. How could one infringe? One way would be to scan the or re- typesetting the text verbatim and put these things into a one's commercially sold Java textbook. That is clearly where there was access to the author's work and substantial copying, which likely to be beyond the bounds of fair use, and thus, require a license from the author.

What did Google do? Well, they looked at an Apache project, called Harmony, and used its documentation in order to form the skeletal outline of a key, but minority, part of the language, library, and virtual machine for Android, with "key" meaning the few packages of the java language which would provide a degree of comfort and compatibility for an experienced java programmer.

Oracle was trying to sell the jury on the idea that copying of someone's copy of the skeleton of Apache's independent and substantially different non-derivative work was tantamount to copying from the full body of Sun's original work. The jury could have said non-infringing for various reasons. I would have said non-infringing because a language is not documentation and the documentation that Google has provided does not look to be copied from Oracle's documentation.

As to the original question, if a published work is protectable by copyright, it is so whether it was generated by one person in a den, a team of five-year-olds, an audio card writing to a file the output from a program that generates musical notes via a random process filtered by probabilistic analyses of Mozart's compositions, or a program that filters source code. What has to be kept clear is the difference between the published work, which may be copyrighted, and the ideas, which may not.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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