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.
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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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.
“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.
Second part of the case begins, this is the one I was less confident on for Google. A patent is much more defined, they basically will have to prove it should never have earned a patent. Part of this will depend on how literally the “machine” aspect of virtual machine is taken.
Where was this article 3 weeks ago? I thought I must have been misunderstanding something with the lack of concern over the possible precedents this case could set. Especially in today’s climate we need as much openness as possible for innovation to thrive. Our intellectual property laws have become a hindrance rather than a reward. Programming languages and API’s need to be thought of as the same as regular language, they’re not a product.
This keeps getting more intense. Keep in mind though this is only the first round and there are 2 other entire sections to discuss in this case.
Interesting timing given the Google vs. Oracle case. It holds no precedent over the decision there but it will be interesting to see how the conclusion compares to the one here.
Pretty self-explanatory.
