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Ars got it wrong - go to GroklawArs got it wrong - go to GroklawPosted May 8, 2012 22:13 UTC (Tue) by dbruce (subscriber, #57948)Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)
I know there are comments above which basically say the same thing, but later posters don't seem to have seen them.
This was a nearly-complete win for Google. To paraphrase, the judge instructed the jury that "If we assume for a moment that APIs are copyrightable (which I will decide later), does that mean Google infringed anything"? The jury responded that "If APIs are copyrightable, then yes, Google infringed them. Plus, Google shouldn't have copied that 9 line function that slipped into Android by mistake and has since been removed".
So, Oracle is dead in the water as far as copyrights are concerned unless the judge accepts their radical idea that APIs can be copyrighted, which would fly in the face of how programming has worked for decades. This judge clearly "gets it", and is well aware of the recent EU decision on this very subject. I think Google will be completely off the hook except for the nine lines of now-removed code of the 15M LOC in Android. Perhaps the judge will award Oracle 0.0000006% of the price of a few hundred million *free* downloads of the Android system.
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Ars got it wrong - go to Groklaw Posted May 8, 2012 22:32 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
I'm amazed (and pleased) that things are moving this quickly. I'm comparing this to the SCO case (series of cases), which went on for what, 7 years?
Ars got it wrong - go to Groklaw Posted May 9, 2012 13:17 UTC (Wed) by charlieb (subscriber, #23340) [Link]
> I'm comparing this to the SCO case (series of cases), which went on
> for what, 7 years?
You speak about that case in the past tense - but it is still ongoing.
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