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Work as a whole - probably arrays.java or package it is contained in | 189 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
i hereby copyright "in"
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, August 04 2012 @ 03:22 PM EDT
pay me now
see how that fails....
look at what you wrote and everytime you use letter "in" pay
me a nickle ....

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Work as a whole - probably arrays.java or package it is contained in
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, August 04 2012 @ 04:11 PM EDT
Sorry for the long title. I find it hard to give a one-size-fits-all opinion on
this. If I designed a small hierarchy of classes all at once, I might consider
that as a work as a whole, especially if I were to use as a building block for
multiple programs.
Whatever way you look at it, rangecheck is intellectually trivial. It is a
typical assertion.
I disagree with the notion that any good hgih school graduate could write this:
any starting programmer, whether in or out of school could write this. I would
just hope that this type of code could be disabled, depending on compiler
settings, in order to reduce overhead.
Maybe Oracle could add syntax for Java to that effect.
I am a programmer by the way.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Work as a whole
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, August 04 2012 @ 04:13 PM EDT

Oracle wishes to get a mountain's ransom for a mole hill. Scratch that. Ant hill. As to your argument, pick any ten programmers of my lesser abilities, put them in different rooms and you'd get code that looks the same. There aren't any degrees of creativity required in order to pull off a parameter sanity check; this is not a task that takes much staring at the white board and a walk around the block to crack.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Oh dear, give me a break!
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, August 04 2012 @ 05:12 PM EDT
You think that something that every programmer writes in her sleep, that has
been reproduced thousands of times and has no identifiable creative content is
copyrightable?

If rangecheck is copyrightable then I can copyright the word "and" and
you are guilty of infringement. Pay up!!!

This copyright nonsense has gotten out of hand and it is appalling that anyone,
and I mean ANYONE could be so gullible as to swallow the idea that rangecheck is
copyrightable. Corporations seem to have destroyed your ability to think.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Not copyrightable by any sane observer
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, August 04 2012 @ 08:04 PM EDT
Forget for a moment about the size of the rest of Android -
even if you consider this function as a work in itself, no
unbiased programmer would argue that it contains enough
creative work to be eligible for copyright, just as a list
of entries in a telephone directory cannot be protected by
copyright.

This function could be something written for a one-day
homework assignment of a high school student with a couple
months of programming in Java.

All Oracle engineers must be cringing and looking down at
their shoes right now.

DSB

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Work as a whole
Authored by: tknarr on Saturday, August 04 2012 @ 09:49 PM EDT

I think rangeCheck() fails on both quantitative and qualitative grounds, and this is speaking as someone who's a professional software developer.

Qualitatively, what's it do? It takes 3 arguments: the array length and the starting and ending indexes. It does three checks: that the starting index is >= 0, that the ending index is <= the array length, and that the ending index is greater than the starting index. Those are exactly the minimum checks for a valid range in an array. The code is 3 if statements corresponding exactly to those three checks. I'd not only expect any college student in a programming class to be able to write this function, I'd require them to be able to write it correctly and be able to explain what it's purpose was and why it should be used to check every array access. And given that the only real opening for variation here lies in a) the order the 3 if statements occur in and b) the sense of the comparisons, given a modern auto-formatting editor I'd expect there to be only about 3-4 basic versions of the function and at least half the class would turn in the most obvious one. This function is the moral equivalent of "It was a dark and stormy night." as the opening line of a novel: even if you consider the unit of comparison to be the paragraph, the phrase is too basic, too obvious and too simple to be a significant amount of copying if that's all that was copied.

Quantitatively, it's 4 code statements: the function declaration and three if statements. The editor may spread those 4 lines onto more physical lines to fit them within a margin, but to the compiler that newline at the end of each line is just another bit of whitespace equivalent to a space or tab character. The function declaration is purely functional, expressing a defined API the person writing the code isn't free to deviate from. That leaves us with 3 statements out of the 500 or so statements in that module. Combine that with the qualitative lack and there's no way to consider this copying to be any thing other than de minimis.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Work as a whole
Authored by: Wol on Sunday, August 05 2012 @ 10:34 AM EDT
The problem for Oracle, aiui, is that "work as a whole" actually has a
legal definition. And in this case, that is completely OPPOSITE to your
definition.

"Work as whole" means, for copyright purposes, "the work
registered at the copyright office". In this case, there is a single
registration for all of Java.

THIS is the problem Oracle has - that is a massive footgun that is going to blow
holes in most of Oracle's arguments.

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

irrelevant
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, August 05 2012 @ 12:25 PM EDT
"...I consider "work as a whole" the smallest containing
functional unit that makes independent sense..."

Google isn't worried about making independent sense...

This is a copyright case, and Google is merely pointing out what the copyright
says. Oracle didn't copyright the function or the array... the copyright Oracle
is asserting is over Java in its entirety.

So regardless of what anyone might think should logically be 'the work', Google
says Oracle neglected to make that logical parsing in their copyright, and
brought a claim that encompasses the whole. And nine lines of the whole is less
than trivial.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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