API is just the interface (e.g. add(operand1, operand2) - i.e. no implementation to that - and implementation is basically 99%+ of the code).
Being able to use an API for compatibility purposes is no different than for example Open Office being able to implement the file format for Word. The need for competition outweighs the argument as an API protected IP. Google's implementation uses the API (common) and then the implementation code which is probably more than 99% of the code base. As long as Google did not copy the code itself the API itself should be fair use. Languages and APIs should not be able to be protected as API.
The court has already previously ruled that you cannot protect interfaces for hardware for the purposes of locking out the competition on things like printer cartridges etc. An API is not much different than the software equivalent.
However, even if you are diehard Google hater - it's not clear whether copyrighting Apis ist a good idea.
I don't think it is. However, I also don't think that someone who knowingly and willingly tries to find a way around a technology licensing agreement for tremendous profit should go unpunished.
Well if you think they shouldn't be copyrightable then you can't object to Google suing them.
I think it's also important to put the work that goes into Apis into perspective. Yes they take creativity. But they are not usually created out fo thin air. The Java API is influenced by countless Apis before it such as C and C++.
Oracle itself has benefited from standing on the shoulder of Giants. I am not aware that they pay IBM for the SQL syntax (admittedly a language rather than API but clearly groundbreaking and which changed the database industry). All the companies that use Hadoop based their work on the original Google 2005 MapReduce paper that outlines MR and GFS (both of which Hadoop implements).
Oracle stands out for being incredible litigious and greedy. We will see who will win the next round in this particular fight.
Forget the world of business and who owns what company. I just have one simple question: do you think what Andy Rubin and company did with Java is right?
In regard to those cases you state, if there are clear cases of licensing infringement (or clear intentional loophole exploitation) there, then I think Oracle should be made to pay. The same way I think that Google should pay for what was done with Java. Regardless of the fact that Java is now open source to anyone, at the time, the intent of Sun was to allow open source usage of Java in educational/non-profit situations, but you had to take a license if it was bundled in a commercial product. Which was pretty standard for the time -- Qt used this model as well.
Business decisions are not dependent on morality as a general rule. So yes let's forget who owns the company.
There's been lots of questionable moves over the years, the highest profile example off the top of my head being Apple's use of Xerox IP and "hard work" design. While it didn't turn out to be found illegal the argument could be made it just wasn't right, that the intent to take it without recompense was there. Yeah some money changed hands but not for the usage that Apple put it to IIRC. After all the court filings from Xerox were over with it wasn't actually illegal tho, even if it might not have been "right" in the view of some folks. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html Are there similarities here?
Opening the doors to your technology company (Xerox), giving someone a demo of the technology you're working on without an agreement in place, and having them go off and invest 5 or 6 years + a lot of money creating their own, fairly different version of it (including designing custom hardware) is pretty different than having someone willfully look for a loophole in your software licensing agreement (and exploit open source projects to do so with minimal investment of time, effort, or ideas).
So that you're completely OK with. No issue with Android being influenced by Apple design choices then? It's certainly a fairly different version of it, requires years of work and a lot of money, and includes developing custom hardware.
You clearly don’t know the history of xerox parc and Apple. SMH
<br><br> No sir, you don't. Apple paid $1m in Apple shares for the privilege of what it took from PARC Xerox and vastly improved on it to boot.
You sir are apparently the one not familiar with it, and I've no idea what @radarthekat is hinting at. Perhaps he'll expand on his lone sentence.
f you go back at look at the history that's not what Apple gave them stock options for, not that it ended up mattering, and no Apple did not give Xerox a $million in stock.They gave Xerox the right to BUY 100,000 shares at $10/share which Xerox did, spending $1M of Xerox money buying those shares. Apple may have received a double benefit too. Besides getting $1M from Xerox they also may have avoided a patent infringement suit from one of the Xerox divisions, Shugart, by making Xerox an investor. So yeah I kinda get the history. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html
And so how on earth do you equate that with what Google did with respect to Java? Seems Apple and Xerox reached a proper accord, as businesses should attempt to do. And Xerox made the decision to divest their shares at some point thereafter. Think if they had simply held them. Seems it would easily have been Xerox who got the better end of the deal in that case.
I would have thought after reading the thread to that point you would have understood the reason for mentioning it had to do with a "morality" point raised by Auxio.
Any possible direct similarities exist in the the claims of the aggrieved parties and the responses of the defendants in arguing for dismissal, in Google's case referring to the originally filed lawsuit and not this appeal. The details of Apple/Xerox and Google/Sun arrangements are of course quite a bit different as you point out with Google being more obviously "in the wrong" IMO. But at the same time both Google and Apple took what they got for free, and neither of the parties who own what they took were happy about it. Xerox sued, Sun Micro didn't. Then Oracle buys Sun Micro a few years later and here we are.
Google is unlikely to get away with it, and rightly so. It was a dumb decision.
Your "whataboutism" is getting the better of you.
The only thing that Apple got out of their "negotiated" visit to Xerox PARC was a convinced Steve Jobs on GUI. One cannot know alternate history, but it's likely that Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, Bruce Horn, and Andy Herzfield would have prevailed on a GUI for the Macintosh without that visit. There was plenty of push at that time for a GUI in the computer industry anyway. At the same time, Xerox was certainly compensated for the visit; they were just too "academic" to realize how to commerciaizel their technology, and they lost a lot of employees for that. Sucks to be them, especially to lose John Warnock.
"For more than a decade now, I've listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This "fact" is reported over and over, by people who don't know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn't true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial."
I was a young engineer working in the Bay Area at that time, and naturally there was a lot of news and rumors about Apple, Commodore Amiga, and Digital Research's GEM GUI. Ordered my Mac 128 a week after announcement. BTW, John Warnock likely saved the Macintosh with Adobe Postscript;
I don't really care about Oracle and Google, but much of Google's history has been vacuuming up somebody else's content under "fair use", and and dispersing it with advertising. Youtube is an acquisition for Google that happened precisely because of that.
API is just the interface (e.g. add(operand1, operand2) - i.e. no implementation to that - and implementation is basically 99%+ of the code).
Being able to use an API for compatibility purposes is no different than for example Open Office being able to implement the file format for Word. The need for competition outweighs the argument as an API protected IP. Google's implementation uses the API (common) and then the implementation code which is probably more than 99% of the code base. As long as Google did not copy the code itself the API itself should be fair use. Languages and APIs should not be able to be protected as API.
The court has already previously ruled that you cannot protect interfaces for hardware for the purposes of locking out the competition on things like printer cartridges etc. An API is not much different than the software equivalent.
However, even if you are diehard Google hater - it's not clear whether copyrighting Apis ist a good idea.
I don't think it is. However, I also don't think that someone who knowingly and willingly tries to find a way around a technology licensing agreement for tremendous profit should go unpunished.
Well if you think they shouldn't be copyrightable then you can't object to Google suing them.
I think it's also important to put the work that goes into Apis into perspective. Yes they take creativity. But they are not usually created out fo thin air. The Java API is influenced by countless Apis before it such as C and C++.
Oracle itself has benefited from standing on the shoulder of Giants. I am not aware that they pay IBM for the SQL syntax (admittedly a language rather than API but clearly groundbreaking and which changed the database industry). All the companies that use Hadoop based their work on the original Google 2005 MapReduce paper that outlines MR and GFS (both of which Hadoop implements).
Oracle stands out for being incredible litigious and greedy. We will see who will win the next round in this particular fight.
Forget the world of business and who owns what company. I just have one simple question: do you think what Andy Rubin and company did with Java is right?
In regard to those cases you state, if there are clear cases of licensing infringement (or clear intentional loophole exploitation) there, then I think Oracle should be made to pay. The same way I think that Google should pay for what was done with Java. Regardless of the fact that Java is now open source to anyone, at the time, the intent of Sun was to allow open source usage of Java in educational/non-profit situations, but you had to take a license if it was bundled in a commercial product. Which was pretty standard for the time -- Qt used this model as well.
Business decisions are not dependent on morality as a general rule. So yes let's forget who owns the company.
There's been lots of questionable moves over the years, the highest profile example off the top of my head being Apple's use of Xerox IP and "hard work" design. While it didn't turn out to be found illegal the argument could be made it just wasn't right, that the intent to take it without recompense was there. Yeah some money changed hands but not for the usage that Apple put it to IIRC. After all the court filings from Xerox were over with it wasn't actually illegal tho, even if it might not have been "right" in the view of some folks. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html Are there similarities here?
Opening the doors to your technology company (Xerox), giving someone a demo of the technology you're working on without an agreement in place, and having them go off and invest 5 or 6 years + a lot of money creating their own, fairly different version of it (including designing custom hardware) is pretty different than having someone willfully look for a loophole in your software licensing agreement (and exploit open source projects to do so with minimal investment of time, effort, or ideas).
So that you're completely OK with. No issue with Android being influenced by Apple design choices then? It's certainly a fairly different version of it, requires years of work and a lot of money, and includes developing custom hardware.
You clearly don’t know the history of xerox parc and Apple. SMH
<br><br> No sir, you don't. Apple paid $1m in Apple shares for the privilege of what it took from PARC Xerox and vastly improved on it to boot.
You sir are apparently the one not familiar with it, and I've no idea what @radarthekat is hinting at. Perhaps he'll expand on his lone sentence.
f you go back at look at the history that's not what Apple gave them stock options for, not that it ended up mattering, and no Apple did not give Xerox a $million in stock.They gave Xerox the right to BUY 100,000 shares at $10/share which Xerox did, spending $1M of Xerox money buying those shares. Apple may have received a double benefit too. Besides getting $1M from Xerox they also may have avoided a patent infringement suit from one of the Xerox divisions, Shugart, by making Xerox an investor. So yeah I kinda get the history. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html
And so how on earth do you equate that with what Google did with respect to Java? Seems Apple and Xerox reached a proper accord, as businesses should attempt to do. And Xerox made the decision to divest their shares at some point thereafter. Think if they had simply held them. Seems it would easily have been Xerox who got the better end of the deal in that case.
I would have thought after reading the thread to that point you would have understood the reason for mentioning it had to do with a "morality" point raised by Auxio.
Any possible direct similarities exist in the the claims of the aggrieved parties and the responses of the defendants in arguing for dismissal, in Google's case referring to the originally filed lawsuit and not this appeal. The details of Apple/Xerox and Google/Sun arrangements are of course quite a bit different as you point out with Google being more obviously "in the wrong" IMO. But at the same time both Google and Apple took what they got for free, and neither of the parties who own what they took were happy about it. Xerox sued, Sun Micro didn't. Then Oracle buys Sun Micro a few years later and here we are.
Google is unlikely to get away with it, and rightly so. It was a dumb decision.
"For more than a decade now, I've listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This "fact" is reported over and over, by people who don't know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn't true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial."
Yes, I had already read that Folklore piece as well as parts of Apple Confidential 2.0, another good resource if you hadn't read it and it's a great one IMO if you're into Apple history. Quite a few names dropped of people you might have know based on what you've said. The parts you'd be interested in here start on this page: https://goo.gl/fnMj4q By the way you'll only be able to read a limited "snippet" of the book itself, fair use stuff. Otherwise you'll need to purchase the book.
What Oracle has done with Java since they bought it (well after Android was on the market) has sent it far downhill in my view. First they started bundling trashy and near impossible to rid ASK malware in with their automatic Java updates to slip it past consumers, then trying to force McAfee subscription virus software on those same consumers by using the same sneaky method, and then Yahoo snatching your browser and who knows what other software packages that many folks didn't even know was being installed too. That they escaped being sued for it is only because of technicalities IMO. It's still despicable conduct. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2613298/java/java-scam--how-oracle-and-ask-profit-from-sneaky-add-ons.html https://www.techlicious.com/blog/java-yahoo-browser-search-settings-hijacking/
Even the Oracle Java software as a whole has become more problematic security-wise and far less trustworthy, to the point that a great number of folks won't get anywhere near it given the choice, and professional advice is to rid your computer's of it.
So I don't weep for an Ellison-led Oracle
More whataboutism, a known logical fallacy we've explained to you before. It doesn't matter if Ellison & Oracle kick puppies, it has no bearing on their argument.
Who's "we"? You mean "You"? My bad for sometimes not paying any attention to what you post. I missed the explanation "we" explained to me before.
So that's great news really, you've decided whataboutism is a bad thing to do here along with any other logical fallacies too, correct? Well that should cut down on a few of your posts about Android/Google in Apple specific threads and a multitude of various comments offered to explain away stuff you didn't like reading from others here. So logic from now on from you and you'll teach me the way by example. Thanks!
So just to make sure I get it since I don't want to bother "we" for yet another slap on the wrist: If rather than arguing the specific content of some post I make someone were to say to me "Your consistent, slavish support for Google reflects the same sort of amorality that often takes the shape of hypocrisy" or "Must be so upsetting for you to find your employer steals IP" or "Typical of a googler, tho, as valuing privacy is not part of your business model" that would be the kind of illogical Tu quoque ad-hom that you're trying to educate me about, right? Just trying to wrap my head around who you think argues by logic and who argues by illogical ad-hom or other fallacy of thought. Wanna' make sure I recognize it when I see it.
Edit: Gosh I'm sorry @StrangeDays ;. That last illogical ad-hom was yours from a day or so ago. Must have been a simple slip-up on your part.
“We” being members of this forum. The tu quoque link has been posted by multiple commenters in the past week, and your whataboutism has been noted several times.
You sound pissy. Must be the bad news for your company.
As for my comment on the FBI and privacy thread (“Typical of a googler, tho, as valuing privacy is not part of your business model"), I wasn’t presenting a logical argument so it’s not a fallacy. I was observing that your poor opinion of privacy was typical for a google employee/investor/cheerleader as privacy is not part of the business model for the company you hold a torch for. What’s there to disagree with?
Nice try at more whataboutism tho. I could have said you kicked puppies and it wouldn’t change the validity of what I’ve said here — that using whataboutism in an argument position is a fallacy. You must refute the claim being argued, not the person. Hitler’s ghost could say murder is wrong and he wouldn’t be wrong, it doesn’t matter what he did or said previously. The position must be argued, not the man.
What Oracle has done with Java since they bought it (well after Android was on the market) has sent it far downhill in my view. First they started bundling trashy and near impossible to rid ASK malware in with their automatic Java updates to slip it past consumers, then trying to force McAfee subscription virus software on those same consumers by using the same sneaky method, and then Yahoo snatching your browser and who knows what other software packages that many folks didn't even know was being installed too. That they escaped being sued for it is only because of technicalities IMO. It's still despicable conduct. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2613298/java/java-scam--how-oracle-and-ask-profit-from-sneaky-add-ons.html https://www.techlicious.com/blog/java-yahoo-browser-search-settings-hijacking/
Even the Oracle Java software as a whole has become more problematic security-wise and far less trustworthy, to the point that a great number of folks won't get anywhere near it given the choice, and professional advice is to rid your computer's of it.
So I don't weep for an Ellison-led Oracle
More whataboutism, a known logical fallacy we've explained to you before. It doesn't matter if Ellison & Oracle kick puppies, it has no bearing on their argument.
Who's "we"? You mean "You"? My bad for sometimes not paying any attention to what you post. I missed the explanation "we" explained to me before.
So that's great news really, you've decided whataboutism is a bad thing to do here along with any other logical fallacies too, correct? Well that should cut down on a few of your posts about Android/Google in Apple specific threads and a multitude of various comments offered to explain away stuff you didn't like reading from others here. So logic from now on from you and you'll teach me the way by example. Thanks!
So just to make sure I get it since I don't want to bother "we" for yet another slap on the wrist: If rather than arguing the specific content of some post I make someone were to say to me "Your consistent, slavish support for Google reflects the same sort of amorality that often takes the shape of hypocrisy" or "Must be so upsetting for you to find your employer steals IP" or "Typical of a googler, tho, as valuing privacy is not part of your business model" that would be the kind of illogical Tu quoque ad-hom that you're trying to educate me about, right? Just trying to wrap my head around who you think argues by logic and who argues by illogical ad-hom or other fallacy of thought. Wanna' make sure I recognize it when I see it.
Edit: Gosh I'm sorry @StrangeDays ;. That last illogical ad-hom was yours from a day or so ago. Must have been a simple slip-up on your part.
We being members of this forum. The tu quoque link has been posted by multiple commenters in the past week, and your whataboutism has been noted several times.
You sound pissy. Must be the bad news for your company.
Ah, OK!... so that's another logic fail you're aiming at me, in this case the illogical Tu quoque ad-hom tactic you mentioned right? Ok I think I'm getting the hang of this. So is what you said to me in your reply an example of "whataboutism" too? Thanks helping with your own examples. Much appreciated.
What Oracle has done with Java since they bought it (well after Android was on the market) has sent it far downhill in my view. First they started bundling trashy and near impossible to rid ASK malware in with their automatic Java updates to slip it past consumers, then trying to force McAfee subscription virus software on those same consumers by using the same sneaky method, and then Yahoo snatching your browser and who knows what other software packages that many folks didn't even know was being installed too. That they escaped being sued for it is only because of technicalities IMO. It's still despicable conduct. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2613298/java/java-scam--how-oracle-and-ask-profit-from-sneaky-add-ons.html https://www.techlicious.com/blog/java-yahoo-browser-search-settings-hijacking/
Even the Oracle Java software as a whole has become more problematic security-wise and far less trustworthy, to the point that a great number of folks won't get anywhere near it given the choice, and professional advice is to rid your computer's of it.
So I don't weep for an Ellison-led Oracle
More whataboutism, a known logical fallacy we've explained to you before. It doesn't matter if Ellison & Oracle kick puppies, it has no bearing on their argument.
Who's "we"? You mean "You"? My bad for sometimes not paying any attention to what you post. I missed the explanation "we" explained to me before.
So that's great news really, you've decided whataboutism is a bad thing to do here along with any other logical fallacies too, correct? Well that should cut down on a few of your posts about Android/Google in Apple specific threads and a multitude of various comments offered to explain away stuff you didn't like reading from others here. So logic from now on from you and you'll teach me the way by example. Thanks!
So just to make sure I get it since I don't want to bother "we" for yet another slap on the wrist: If rather than arguing the specific content of some post I make someone were to say to me "Your consistent, slavish support for Google reflects the same sort of amorality that often takes the shape of hypocrisy" or "Must be so upsetting for you to find your employer steals IP" or "Typical of a googler, tho, as valuing privacy is not part of your business model" that would be the kind of illogical Tu quoque ad-hom that you're trying to educate me about, right? Just trying to wrap my head around who you think argues by logic and who argues by illogical ad-hom or other fallacy of thought. Wanna' make sure I recognize it when I see it.
Edit: Gosh I'm sorry @StrangeDays ;. That last illogical ad-hom was yours from a day or so ago. Must have been a simple slip-up on your part.
As for my comment on the FBI and privacy thread (“Typical of a googler, tho, as valuing privacy is not part of your business model"), I wasn’t presenting a logical argument so it’s not a fallacy. I was observing that your poor opinion of privacy was typical for a google employee/investor/cheerleader as privacy is not part of the business model for the company you hold a torch for. What’s there to disagree with?
Nice try at more whataboutism tho. I could have said you kicked puppies and it wouldn’t change the validity of what I’ve said here — that using whataboutism in an argument position is a fallacy. You must refute the claim being argued, not the person. Hitler’s ghost could say murder is wrong and he wouldn’t be wrong, it doesn’t matter what he did or said previously. The position must be argued, not the man.
Ah, the quick edit once you saw my initial reply... Since I'm no employee of Google your tagging me as one and then claiming that their transgressions and/or business model must also be mine would seem a very obvious "whataboutism" and logic-failing Tu quoque aimed at "the man and not the position". And not just once, yet again today. In the recent past you've done much the same referring to Google as "my employer" IIRC (to be fair there are one or two others here who use that same logic-failing tactic) along with other sundry comments intended to attack the person rather than the position.
Unfortunately you can't walk it back once you are quoted. You really should take your own medicine before trying to dispense it to others.
This ruling is a lot bigger then this situation. If APIs can now be copyrighted the entire industry will change dramatically. We have copied APIs for decades and it is vital for the tech world we have today.
Heck, Oracle themselves abuse this ruling and re-use APIs.
It is bigger than APIs. It's about whether it's legal to try and exploit loopholes in licensing agreements as Google did when they didn't wan't to abide by the terms Sun had set out for bundling Java on Android devices and knowingly decided to exploit open source projects to bundle Java anyways. Gaining them the benefit of the millions of dollars Sun had invested in Java, a mature app development ecosystem, and an unfair advantage over competitors who were abiding by that licensing agreement.
But no one in the tech industry seems to want to come clean on this. They want to keep it mired in the technical details and keep people confused about the real issue at hand.
This ruling is a lot bigger then this situation. If APIs can now be copyrighted the entire industry will change dramatically. We have copied APIs for decades and it is vital for the tech world we have today.
Heck, Oracle themselves abuse this ruling and re-use APIs.
It is bigger than APIs. It's about whether it's legal to try and exploit loopholes in licensing agreements as Google did when they willfully didn't wan't to abide by the terms Sun had set out for bundling Java on Android devices. Gaining them the benefit of the millions of dollars Sun had invested in Java, a mature app development ecosystem, and an unfair advantage over competitors who were abiding by that licensing agreement.
And I agree. At the end of the day tho it's even more about "what's right", even if the lawsuit fails in large part. (I don't think it will entirely). Google made a really bad choice IMO even if at the time it was deemed at least not worth pursuing in Sun's view, possibly not even considered a clear breach of terms, and even well after the fact their CEO from that time period saying they had no huge issue with it. It was still the wrong thing to do.
One little disagreement: AFAIK there were no OS competitors disadvantaged because they were licensing Java but Google wasn't. Still a valid point overall tho in the grand scheme.
Google's MO and way of doing business is stealing IP. Whether ripping off JAVA to create android, or copyrighted material on youtube or digitizing books. Google always cries "fair use" claiming they aren't making any money from the stolen IP, when in fact they are data mining to sell ads which accounts for the majority of its revenue. The bulk of which has increasingly come from their mobile platform, android. Oracle should go after every single dime of that!
This ruling is a lot bigger then this situation. If APIs can now be copyrighted the entire industry will change dramatically. We have copied APIs for decades and it is vital for the tech world we have today.
Heck, Oracle themselves abuse this ruling and re-use APIs.
It is bigger than APIs. It's about whether it's legal to try and exploit loopholes in licensing agreements as Google did when they willfully didn't wan't to abide by the terms Sun had set out for bundling Java on Android devices. Gaining them the benefit of the millions of dollars Sun had invested in Java, a mature app development ecosystem, and an unfair advantage over competitors who were abiding by that licensing agreement.
And I agree. At the end of the day tho it's even more about "what's right", even if the lawsuit fails in large part. (I don't think it will entirely). Google made a really bad choice IMO even if at the time it was deemed at least not worth pursuing in Sun's view, possibly not even considered a clear breach of terms, and even well after the fact their CEO from that time period saying they had no huge issue with it. It was still the wrong thing to do.
One little disagreement: AFAIK there were no OS competitors disadvantaged because they were licensing Java but Google wasn't. Still a valid point overall tho in the grand scheme.
This ruling is a lot bigger then this situation. If APIs can now be copyrighted the entire industry will change dramatically. We have copied APIs for decades and it is vital for the tech world we have today.
Heck, Oracle themselves abuse this ruling and re-use APIs.
It is bigger than APIs. It's about whether it's legal to try and exploit loopholes in licensing agreements as Google did when they willfully didn't wan't to abide by the terms Sun had set out for bundling Java on Android devices. Gaining them the benefit of the millions of dollars Sun had invested in Java, a mature app development ecosystem, and an unfair advantage over competitors who were abiding by that licensing agreement.
And I agree. At the end of the day tho it's even more about "what's right", even if the lawsuit fails in large part. (I don't think it will entirely). Google made a really bad choice IMO even if at the time it was deemed at least not worth pursuing in Sun's view, possibly not even considered a clear breach of terms, and even well after the fact their CEO from that time period saying they had no huge issue with it. It was still the wrong thing to do.
One little disagreement: AFAIK there were no OS competitors disadvantaged because they were licensing Java but Google wasn't. Still a valid point overall tho in the grand scheme.
Mel, very obviously the court system at the time felt that the case had too many questions surrounding it from the timing to the possible issue of copyright notice and chose to dismiss it. Had the Google/Java/Oracle lawsuit taken place back in 89 instead of now I think perhaps it too would have been dismissed. But it isn't.
By the same token if Apple would have to defend against that same Xerox case today instead of back in 1989 I'm not certain they'd fare as well. A lot has changed in IP law and its translation in the past 15 years.
Two totally different cases. One has nothing to do with the other. Google has don’t this a number of times before.
API is just the interface (e.g. add(operand1, operand2) - i.e. no implementation to that - and implementation is basically 99%+ of the code).
Being able to use an API for compatibility purposes is no different than for example Open Office being able to implement the file format for Word. The need for competition outweighs the argument as an API protected IP. Google's implementation uses the API (common) and then the implementation code which is probably more than 99% of the code base. As long as Google did not copy the code itself the API itself should be fair use. Languages and APIs should not be able to be protected as API.
The court has already previously ruled that you cannot protect interfaces for hardware for the purposes of locking out the competition on things like printer cartridges etc. An API is not much different than the software equivalent.
However, even if you are diehard Google hater - it's not clear whether copyrighting Apis ist a good idea.
I don't think it is. However, I also don't think that someone who knowingly and willingly tries to find a way around a technology licensing agreement for tremendous profit should go unpunished.
Well if you think they shouldn't be copyrightable then you can't object to Google suing them.
I think it's also important to put the work that goes into Apis into perspective. Yes they take creativity. But they are not usually created out fo thin air. The Java API is influenced by countless Apis before it such as C and C++.
Oracle itself has benefited from standing on the shoulder of Giants. I am not aware that they pay IBM for the SQL syntax (admittedly a language rather than API but clearly groundbreaking and which changed the database industry). All the companies that use Hadoop based their work on the original Google 2005 MapReduce paper that outlines MR and GFS (both of which Hadoop implements).
Oracle stands out for being incredible litigious and greedy. We will see who will win the next round in this particular fight.
Forget the world of business and who owns what company. I just have one simple question: do you think what Andy Rubin and company did with Java is right?
In regard to those cases you state, if there are clear cases of licensing infringement (or clear intentional loophole exploitation) there, then I think Oracle should be made to pay. The same way I think that Google should pay for what was done with Java. Regardless of the fact that Java is now open source to anyone, at the time, the intent of Sun was to allow open source usage of Java in educational/non-profit situations, but you had to take a license if it was bundled in a commercial product. Which was pretty standard for the time -- Qt used this model as well.
Business decisions are not dependent on morality as a general rule. So yes let's forget who owns the company.
There's been lots of questionable moves over the years, the highest profile example off the top of my head being Apple's use of Xerox IP and "hard work" design. While it didn't turn out to be found illegal the argument could be made it just wasn't right, that the intent to take it without recompense was there. Yeah some money changed hands but not for the usage that Apple put it to IIRC. After all the court filings from Xerox were over with it wasn't actually illegal tho, even if it might not have been "right" in the view of some folks. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html Are there similarities here?
Opening the doors to your technology company (Xerox), giving someone a demo of the technology you're working on without an agreement in place, and having them go off and invest 5 or 6 years + a lot of money creating their own, fairly different version of it (including designing custom hardware) is pretty different than having someone willfully look for a loophole in your software licensing agreement (and exploit open source projects to do so with minimal investment of time, effort, or ideas).
So that you're completely OK with. No issue with Android being influenced by Apple design choices then? It's certainly a fairly different version of it, requires years of work and a lot of money, and includes developing custom hardware.
You clearly don’t know the history of xerox parc and Apple. SMH
<br><br> No sir, you don't. Apple paid $1m in Apple shares for the privilege of what it took from PARC Xerox and vastly improved on it to boot.
You sir are apparently the one not familiar with it, and I've no idea what @radarthekat is hinting at. Perhaps he'll expand on his lone sentence.
f you go back at look at the history that's not what Apple gave them stock options for, not that it ended up mattering, and no Apple did not give Xerox a $million in stock.They gave Xerox the right to BUY 100,000 shares at $10/share which Xerox did, spending $1M of Xerox money buying those shares. Apple may have received a double benefit too. Besides getting $1M from Xerox they also may have avoided a patent infringement suit from one of the Xerox divisions, Shugart, by making Xerox an investor. So yeah I kinda get the history. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html
That’s lawsuit was a bit of nonsense. At the time Apple visited PARC, a number of companies were working on the same concepts. The thing that matters here is that while Apple came out with the Lisa, which failed, they then modified it to become the Macintosh, which succeeded.
at the same time, Xerox came out with their own version, which they called the Star. That failed, and as a result, Xerox withdrew from the independent computer business.
this has been a problem for Xeros going back many years. They come up with an idea, and fail to capitalize on it. Apple made major improvements to Xerox’s very primitive UI. When Apple was finished, you could barely see any of Xerox’s work in it. Xerox;s idea for window controls were so,complex they weren’t usable. Other companies working on the concept also had complexity problems. All were eventually abandoned in favor of the much simpler, and intuitive system Apple came up with. So I guess that everyone stole Apple’s ideas. Should they sue everyone else?
My recollection of that story is that Jef Raskin was already committed to creating a graphical UI, and wanted Steve to visit Xerox to validate what they were already working on.
Here's an interview that might be of interest;
Anyone interested should start with a search on Jef Raskin and Macintosh.
Might be appropriate to search on Bill Atkinson as well.
I do remember that. I haven’t read in in a long time. The interesting part, which those trying to have Apple seem nefarious about this, it that what Xerox did had little to do with what Apple did. Apple didn’t use any Xerox code. You can’t really sue properly because you invited someone to look at your work, and they went back and said that this is what what we’re trying to do, but it’s hopelessly useless, and so we need to continue improving what we want to do. Then you get sued over it. The court properly thought that lawsuit was ridiculous.
Mel, very obviously the court system at the time felt that the case had too many questions surrounding it from the timing to the possible issue of copyright notice and chose to dismiss it. Had the Google/Java/Oracle lawsuit taken place back in 89 instead of now I think perhaps it too would have been dismissed. But it isn't.
By the same token if Apple would have to defend against that same Xerox case today instead of back in 1989 I'm not certain they'd fare as well. A lot has changed in IP law and its translation in the past 15 years.
Two totally different cases. One has nothing to do with the other. Google has don’t this a number of times before.
Done what a number of times before Mel? I don't think they've been found to steal IP any more often than any other large tech, Apple included. Willfully doing so is exceedingly rare, and of course a different beast, for both Apple and Google even tho I can find a couple of instances. If you're curious how many do a search for "Apple guilty of willful infringement" and do the same "Google guilty of willful infringement" using your preferred browser.
You might have to look at a couple of the links since some results will be simple infringement rather than willful. Google Search is usually pretty good at pointing out "missing words" for a link, but not certain about other browsers.
I wonder what people think of Florian Mueller right now? Lots of hate thrown his way over the years and it turns out he was right. Not right like someone flipping a coin and claiming they had some kind of insight, but right in giving very detailed reasons why. And now this court decision aligns pretty closely to what Florian predicted.
On the flip side we have Groklaw, shut down years ago in a cowardly manner, being proven wrong in Oracle vs Google.
On a side note, I see the naysayers out with their typical doom & gloom saying stupid things like:
- So I can now sue anyone who uses a=b(x)? - This is going to make everything more expensive for consumers as we’ll have countless lawsuits demanding licensing fees from developers. - Developers are screwed as any API they use will see big companies swoop in and bury them in lawsuits. - This will destroy open source.
And so on.
Just because it's going back to court does not mean Florian Mueller was right. Stop spreading hyperbole.
Except that he was right. He’s almost always right. Doesn’t matter whether you like it.
If they're on the hook for anything financial, it would be the standard licensing fee that they avoided paying initially. I can't see the 9B profit argument holding up in court.
To get 9B, Oracle would have prove that they’d lost a significant chunk of revenue due to theft. Whether this is the case or not depends on how Java is licensed. If it’s a flat fee then no problem. If the charge as a percentage of the product that uses it, then yes, it could run into billions. The only problem is how does one quantify that. Android is free. What percentage of user data sales are attributed to it? What about Android searches? You can’t count those if they went through the Google search engine.
I dont think you can really put a figure on this because the user data extraction, the massaging and the selling on – none of that is done by Java. That’s all Google’s code. So while I think they’re as guilty as hell, I think $9B is stretching it.
I think it's irrelevant if the data extraction is done by Java. A significant chunk of their data comes from Android devices, which one could argue wouldn't exist at all in their current form without Java. Would Android have even taken off if they didn't have a user base of developers already familiar with Java to make it easy for them to start coding for Android?
If Android devices are responsible for 10% of the data Google gets for their targeted ad business, then I think the value is easy to determine (Android contributes 10% of their ad revenue). I don't think Oracle is entitled to ALL of this, just a percentage. So if Oracle is awarded 5% of Android revenue, then they get 0.5% of Googles entire ad revenue. Which would have been a few billion over the last 8 years, but less than the $9 billion suggested in this article.
Dont forget that its determined as willfull infringment damages usually are trippled compared to otherwise. Onthinknthe evidence is there for a willfull infringment outcome,
I remember when Android first came out (I was working as a Java developer at the time) and being surprised that they could use Java without paying *some* kind of royalty, even if they did their own JVM implementation. I guess all these years later it is finally agreed that they should have paid something.
Another factually wrong article on here... DED will you ever write something factual other than embellished nonsense to fit a narrative?
LOL!
Well it's true. Just because Google faces court again doesn't mean they "ripped off" anything. This "article" is written as if it was a done deal, which it has been shown a few times already is not, but that doesn't fit the narrative here.
Actually, you’re wrong. It does show that Google was wrong. It’s just going back for the amount of damages Google should pay.
API is just the interface (e.g. add(operand1, operand2) - i.e. no implementation to that - and implementation is basically 99%+ of the code).
Being able to use an API for compatibility purposes is no different than for example Open Office being able to implement the file format for Word. The need for competition outweighs the argument as an API protected IP. Google's implementation uses the API (common) and then the implementation code which is probably more than 99% of the code base. As long as Google did not copy the code itself the API itself should be fair use. Languages and APIs should not be able to be protected as API.
The court has already previously ruled that you cannot protect interfaces for hardware for the purposes of locking out the competition on things like printer cartridges etc. An API is not much different than the software equivalent.
However, even if you are diehard Google hater - it's not clear whether copyrighting Apis ist a good idea.
I don't think it is. However, I also don't think that someone who knowingly and willingly tries to find a way around a technology licensing agreement for tremendous profit should go unpunished.
Well if you think they shouldn't be copyrightable then you can't object to Google suing them.
I think it's also important to put the work that goes into Apis into perspective. Yes they take creativity. But they are not usually created out fo thin air. The Java API is influenced by countless Apis before it such as C and C++.
Oracle itself has benefited from standing on the shoulder of Giants. I am not aware that they pay IBM for the SQL syntax (admittedly a language rather than API but clearly groundbreaking and which changed the database industry). All the companies that use Hadoop based their work on the original Google 2005 MapReduce paper that outlines MR and GFS (both of which Hadoop implements).
Oracle stands out for being incredible litigious and greedy. We will see who will win the next round in this particular fight.
Forget the world of business and who owns what company. I just have one simple question: do you think what Andy Rubin and company did with Java is right?
In regard to those cases you state, if there are clear cases of licensing infringement (or clear intentional loophole exploitation) there, then I think Oracle should be made to pay. The same way I think that Google should pay for what was done with Java. Regardless of the fact that Java is now open source to anyone, at the time, the intent of Sun was to allow open source usage of Java in educational/non-profit situations, but you had to take a license if it was bundled in a commercial product. Which was pretty standard for the time -- Qt used this model as well.
Business decisions are not dependent on morality as a general rule. So yes let's forget who owns the company.
There's been lots of questionable moves over the years, the highest profile example off the top of my head being Apple's use of Xerox IP and "hard work" design. While it didn't turn out to be found illegal the argument could be made it just wasn't right, that the intent to take it without recompense was there. Yeah some money changed hands but not for the usage that Apple put it to IIRC. After all the court filings from Xerox were over with it wasn't actually illegal tho, even if it might not have been "right" in the view of some folks. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html Are there similarities here?
Opening the doors to your technology company (Xerox), giving someone a demo of the technology you're working on without an agreement in place, and having them go off and invest 5 or 6 years + a lot of money creating their own, fairly different version of it (including designing custom hardware) is pretty different than having someone willfully look for a loophole in your software licensing agreement (and exploit open source projects to do so with minimal investment of time, effort, or ideas).
So that you're completely OK with. No issue with Android being influenced by Apple design choices then? It's certainly a fairly different version of it, requires years of work and a lot of money, and includes developing custom hardware.
You clearly don’t know the history of xerox parc and Apple. SMH
<br><br> No sir, you don't. Apple paid $1m in Apple shares for the privilege of what it took from PARC Xerox and vastly improved on it to boot.
You sir are apparently the one not familiar with it, and I've no idea what @radarthekat is hinting at. Perhaps he'll expand on his lone sentence.
f you go back at look at the history that's not what Apple gave them stock options for, not that it ended up mattering, and no Apple did not give Xerox a $million in stock.They gave Xerox the right to BUY 100,000 shares at $10/share which Xerox did, spending $1M of Xerox money buying those shares. Apple may have received a double benefit too. Besides getting $1M from Xerox they also may have avoided a patent infringement suit from one of the Xerox divisions, Shugart, by making Xerox an investor. So yeah I kinda get the history. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xerox-sues-apple-computer-over-macintosh-copyright.html
That’s lawsuit was a bit of nonsense. At the time Apple visited PARC, a number of companies were working on the same concepts. The thing that matters here is that while Apple came out with the Lisa, which failed, they then modified it to become the Macintosh, which succeeded.
at the same time, Xerox came out with their own version, which they called the Star. That failed, and as a result, Xerox withdrew from the independent computer business.
this has been a problem for Xeros going back many years. They come up with an idea, and fail to capitalize on it. Apple made major improvements to Xerox’s very primitive UI. When Apple was finished, you could barely see any of Xerox’s work in it. Xerox;s idea for window controls were so,complex they weren’t usable. Other companies working on the concept also had complexity problems. All were eventually abandoned in favor of the much simpler, and intuitive system Apple came up with. So I guess that everyone stole Apple’s ideas. Should they sue everyone else?
My recollection of that story is that Jef Raskin was already committed to creating a graphical UI, and wanted Steve to visit Xerox to validate what they were already working on.
Here's an interview that might be of interest;
Anyone interested should start with a search on Jef Raskin and Macintosh.
Might be appropriate to search on Bill Atkinson as well.
Right on Tmay. I've read the same thing. What Steve was shown at Xerox was apparently far different and more integrated than what those Apple engineer's had in mind. Once Mr. Jobs saw what PARC had developed he reportedly took things in a different direction, inspired by the Xerox efforts to realize how much they could really do with it. And thus the McIntosh interface.
Now, you are totally BSing. You are just making that up. It was just the opposite. Xerox;s work was useless. It was also not too much different from what other companies were working on at the same time. The reason why Xerox invited Apple to come over, was because they had heard that Apple was working on something like that, and they wanted to see if Apple was interested in what they were doing.
but what they were doing was so bad, that Apple couldn’t use it. What Apple came up with was far more elegant. What some of you guys simply don’t understand was that Apple wasn’t looking for a complex, yet simplistic up for computer engineers, which is what Xerox had. They were looking for something that didn’t require a couple of weeks to understand.
its interesting that Xerox made major changes to their U.K. over a few years, still lagging way behind what Apple came up with, and it’s Apple’s vision that succeeded, while that if xerox failed. Even Xerox couldn’t see their computers based on their own system.
Another factually wrong article on here... DED will you ever write something factual other than embellished nonsense to fit a narrative?
LOL!
Well it's true. Just because Google faces court again doesn't mean they "ripped off" anything. This "article" is written as if it was a done deal, which it has been shown a few times already is not, but that doesn't fit the narrative here.
Actually, you’re wrong. It does show that Google was wrong. It’s just going back for the amount of damages Google should pay.
It's actually a bit confusing. The Fed Circuit initially sent the case back for Round 2 because they ruled a jury should have determined fair use and not the judge. Now after a jury verdict from Round 2 that said it was fair use the same Fed Circuit sends it back yet again saying no jury could find it was fair use. So why did they send it back for a jury trial in the first place? Oh the weirdness we read about courtroom stuff.
Comments
The only thing that Apple got out of their "negotiated" visit to Xerox PARC was a convinced Steve Jobs on GUI. One cannot know alternate history, but it's likely that Jef Raskin, Bill Atkinson, Burrell Smith, Bruce Horn, and Andy Herzfield would have prevailed on a GUI for the Macintosh without that visit. There was plenty of push at that time for a GUI in the computer industry anyway. At the same time, Xerox was certainly compensated for the visit; they were just too "academic" to realize how to commerciaizel their technology, and they lost a lot of employees for that. Sucks to be them, especially to lose John Warnock.
https://www.folklore.org is a good place for history Apple
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Origins
"For more than a decade now, I've listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This "fact" is reported over and over, by people who don't know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn't true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial."
Xerox's suit against Apple failed;
https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1099&context=chtlj
I was a young engineer working in the Bay Area at that time, and naturally there was a lot of news and rumors about Apple, Commodore Amiga, and Digital Research's GEM GUI. Ordered my Mac 128 a week after announcement. BTW, John Warnock likely saved the Macintosh with Adobe Postscript;
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/02/12/antonoff-column-desktop-publishing/23126873/
I don't really care about Oracle and Google, but much of Google's history has been vacuuming up somebody else's content under "fair use", and and dispersing it with advertising. Youtube is an acquisition for Google that happened precisely because of that.
https://goo.gl/fnMj4q
By the way you'll only be able to read a limited "snippet" of the book itself, fair use stuff. Otherwise you'll need to purchase the book.
You sound pissy. Must be the bad news for your company.
As for my comment on the FBI and privacy thread (“Typical of a googler, tho, as valuing privacy is not part of your business model"), I wasn’t presenting a logical argument so it’s not a fallacy. I was observing that your poor opinion of privacy was typical for a google employee/investor/cheerleader as privacy is not part of the business model for the company you hold a torch for. What’s there to disagree with?
Nice try at more whataboutism tho. I could have said you kicked puppies and it wouldn’t change the validity of what I’ve said here — that using whataboutism in an argument position is a fallacy. You must refute the claim being argued, not the person. Hitler’s ghost could say murder is wrong and he wouldn’t be wrong, it doesn’t matter what he did or said previously. The position must be argued, not the man.
Since I'm no employee of Google your tagging me as one and then claiming that their transgressions and/or business model must also be mine would seem a very obvious "whataboutism" and logic-failing Tu quoque aimed at "the man and not the position". And not just once, yet again today. In the recent past you've done much the same referring to Google as "my employer" IIRC (to be fair there are one or two others here who use that same logic-failing tactic) along with other sundry comments intended to attack the person rather than the position.
Unfortunately you can't walk it back once you are quoted. You really should take your own medicine before trying to dispense it to others.
:spelling:
But no one in the tech industry seems to want to come clean on this. They want to keep it mired in the technical details and keep people confused about the real issue at hand.
One little disagreement: AFAIK there were no OS competitors disadvantaged because they were licensing Java but Google wasn't. Still a valid point overall tho in the grand scheme.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
You might have to look at a couple of the links since some results will be simple infringement rather than willful. Google Search is usually pretty good at pointing out "missing words" for a link, but not certain about other browsers.
Factually wrong in which way? You can’t get away with that statement without explaining exactly what is wrong, and whether it’s minor, or major.
Except that he was right. He’s almost always right. Doesn’t matter whether you like it.
Now, you are totally BSing. You are just making that up. It was just the opposite. Xerox;s work was useless. It was also not too much different from what other companies were working on at the same time. The reason why Xerox invited Apple to come over, was because they had heard that Apple was working on something like that, and they wanted to see if Apple was interested in what they were doing.
but what they were doing was so bad, that Apple couldn’t use it. What Apple came up with was far more elegant. What some of you guys simply don’t understand was that Apple wasn’t looking for a complex, yet simplistic up for computer engineers, which is what Xerox had. They were looking for something that didn’t require a couple of weeks to understand.
its interesting that Xerox made major changes to their U.K. over a few years, still lagging way behind what Apple came up with, and it’s Apple’s vision that succeeded, while that if xerox failed. Even Xerox couldn’t see their computers based on their own system.