Office by Alex Penny
My name is Bill, I am a recent graduate in Information Sciences and Technology from Penn State University and this is a place for me to post or give my 2 cents on the fascinating world of technology. I am now working for a pretty big technology related company whose name I will leave out just to avoid any possible complications, however far-fetched them happening may be. Music gets included from time to time as well.
I used to work with a team that dealt with Oracle, I remember them talking about this coming up. It seems to me Oracle is trying to become the Apple of enterprise computing.
Excellent points, however I think the author misses one major component of the issue, and that is that in a lot of cases consumers aren’t technically customers. Sure Facebook and Google have to keep us happy to an extent, but ultimately the money is being made elsewhere. Unlike the tendency of others commenting on this dilemma I don’t see this as a definite threat, but it certainly creates incentives that could make decisions that are harmful to the single person enticing. It is still wrong for business practices to exploit and abuse the consumer, but what these businesses do has changed and that has played a major role in the shift in mindset.
Okay Larry Ellison is honestly 1 multinational threat away from being a real-life Bond villain at this point.
A federal judge in San Francisco has handed Oracle another setback in its case against Google. Oracle Corp. had accused Google Inc. of stealing Oracle’s Java programming language to build Google‘s Android software for mobile devices.
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It’s amazing how much the jury actually got. The entire time we were worried that these people were sitting there befuddled by jargon, but they actually did an excellent job interpreting the legal reasons behind the laws they were debating and applying them to the case. That they ultimately made the decision based on what’s good for the public really blows my mind, you’ll never find that reasoning in a Texas jury. It’s annoying that the judge’s instructions for them to think of API’s as copyrightable made them feel like their deciding power was limited. This part of the case I feel was the most mishandled and definitely worthy of Google’s call for a mistrial. Still, can’t be upset to see a group of Americans come together and make a thoughtful, rational decision after amicable debating.
How the jury decided that android infringed on copyright but not patents is beyond me. While I can’t say I disagree with the outcome, this entire trial was incredibly strange. Of course we still have to see what the judge decides about whether API’s are covered by copyright or not but I don’t see there being any chance of Oracle coming away from this happy.
“If Alsup finds that the SSO is copyrightable, the two minor infringement counts will be bundled along with the SSO charge to be handled in any new trial or appeal. If he rules against Oracle on this point, however, Alsup will simply award Oracle statutory damages — a maximum of $150,000 for each of the two counts. That doesn’t leave Oracle out in the cold, though; Alsup’s ruling on SSO copyrightability will no doubt be appealed, and should it be overturned and the case sent down to be tried again, Oracle will have the opportunity to re-open the two minor copyright counts to go after larger damages.”
“Given this, says Ronald Abramson, a ruling on the Java APIs could be relevant to almost any other common way of sending data. ‘These are a pretty typical APIs. They’re a definition of how you talk to something,’ he says. ‘This would be a strong precedent and it would be pretty difficult to distinguish them from other APIs…I would be concerned that [the ruling] would have broad ramifications for other APIs and beyond APIs. If you can copyright the structure, sequence, and organization of data, that changes the landscape.’”
It’s ridiculous this is even up for debate. Copyrights are explicitly meant for creative works, patents are meant for processes. Even if this wasn’t the case, saying you could copyright an API in Java is like saying you can copyright the instruments on a recording.
At this point I really don’t have much left to say about this case. It seems like no one is willing to make a definite decision and it’s just boiling down to the two companies arguing. I know that sounds like what a trial should be, but nothing being said seems to be adding anything that could help the judge or jury in their decisions.
The only issue I have with this is that whatever decisions are made from the case still stand for future precedent.
