Ann Droid wants to publish a bestseller. So she sits down with an advance copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—the fifth book—and proceeds to transcribe. She verbatim copies all the chapter titles—from Chapter 1 ("Dudley Demented") to Chapter 38 ("The Second War Begins"). She copies verbatim the topic sentences of each paragraph, starting from the first (highly descriptive) one and continuing, in order, to the last, simple one ("Harry nodded."). She then paraphrases the rest of each paragraph. She rushes the competing version to press before the original under the title: Ann Droid's Harry Potter 5.0. The knockoff flies off the shelves.

J.K. Rowling sues for copyright infringement. Ann's defenses: "But I wrote most of the words from scratch. Besides, this was fair use, because I copied only the portions necessary to tap into the Harry Potter fan base."

Obviously, the defenses would fail.

Defendant Google Inc. has copied a blockbuster literary work just as surely, and as improperly, as Ann Droid—and has offered the same defenses.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/on-appeal-oracle-insists-googles-android-copied-key-java-code/

Go home Oracle, you're drunk.

35 minutes ago, ScanIAm wrote

Most of my carreer I've been able to avoid working with Oracle products, but now that I've done it, I can safely say that it is a much inferior experience in every way.

I would agree, with the exception of MySQL (although, they can barely take credit for that, in their defense at least they haven't screwed it up yet).

My SQL Server experience for the most part has been fairly painless.  Oracle on the other hand is one gotcha after another (their ADO.NET provider is horrid, why you need 500MB of files installed locally is beyond me... you can connect to MySQL with it's ADO.NET provider with a 350K library).  One of the assemblies I had to include to connect to Oracle was 128MB itself (oraociei11.dll, 127,196KB ).  Seriously...

My favorite quark of the Oracle ADO.NET provider is the fact that you have to explicitly tell the OracleCommand object that you want to "BindByName" when referencing parameters.  Every other provider is smart enough to figure out that if you pass it a string, you're referencing the name (it's 2013 after all, shouldn't it all be that easy? ).  Not Oracle though.  To complicate that, they don't say "String not accepted, etc..", they just ignore what you pass in as the name and try to bind it to whatever the next unbinded parameter is (where you will eventually get type mismatch exception and scratch your head wondering why it's telling you that your date variable isn't a date.. that's assuming the data doesn't just go into the wrong fields unless you happened to add them all in the correct order).

Anyway, end rant.

23 minutes ago, Ray7 wrote

yeah, but JK Rowling didn't open source her books, did she?

Is Java open source? Just because you can look at the source code doesn't make something open source.

4 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

Is Java open source? Just because you can look at the source code doesn't make something open source.

Sun open-sourced Java in 2006. When Oracle bought Sun, they bought into that. if they were hoping to win a lawsuit based on the murky area of API copyright then that wasn't very smart. 

7 hours ago, Bas wrote

The details are so bizarre. Why would they explicitly quote sentences, or point out what the titles of various chapters are?

I'm not that familiar with the case but isn't the claim that Google basically wrote their own version of the Java apis? Copying the titles/key plot sentences I think means copying the behaviour (or perhaps even the code) required to make their Java APIs behave like Sun's?

53 minutes ago, Ray7 wrote

*snip*

Sun open-sourced Java in 2006. When Oracle bought Sun, they bought into that. if they were hoping to win a lawsuit based on the murky area of API copyright then that wasn't very smart. 

Java is licensed under the GPL, yes? In which case Google would also have to release their code under the GPL, no? (They may have done this, I'm not familiar with the situation.) Code being open source doesn't mean you can do what you want with it, it still has to be allowed by the license.

1 hour ago, GoddersUK wrote

*snip*

I'm not that familiar with the case but isn't the claim that Google basically wrote their own version of the Java apis? Copying the titles/key plot sentences I think means copying the behaviour (or perhaps even the code) required to make their Java APIs behave like Sun's?

Transcribing a book verbatim is copying a specific creative expression, and is not necessary to make a book that closely competes with Harry Potter. Copying APIs is copying a utilitarian feature of software, and is absolutely necessary for compatibility/integrability purposes.

The thing is, copyright only protects specific creative expressions inherent in works, not ideas, themes or factual/utilitarian features (see patents). So Oracle is making a false equivalency here. It will be interesting to see if the court buys it, but case law in the USA already is pretty much settled that APIs are not copyrightable.

6 hours ago, GoddersUK wrote

Java is licensed under the GPL, yes? In which case Google would also have to release their code under the GPL, no? (They may have done this, I'm not familiar with the situation.)

Code being open source doesn't mean you can do what you want with it, it still has to be allowed by the license.

Google's code is free for anyone to grab and hack, which is why there are so many different versions of Android floating about.  They have abided by the license.  Google was slapped with a tiny fine for code-lifting, but it only amounted to about $150k. The problem Oracle has is that it's very difficult to claim monetary damage when you're giving something away for free. 

4 hours ago, Bass wrote

*snip*

Transcribing a book verbatim is copying a specific creative expression, and is not necessary to make a book that closely competes with Harry Potter. Copying APIs is copying a utilitarian feature of software, and is absolutely necessary for compatibility/integrability purposes.

The thing is, copyright only protects specific creative expressions inherent in works, not ideas, themes or factual/utilitarian features (see patents). So Oracle is making a false equivalency here. It will be interesting to see if the court buys it, but case law in the USA already is pretty much settled that APIs are not copyrightable.

And this certainly won't stick in Europe.