Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 10, 2012 14:54 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576)
In reply to: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica) by ajross
Parent article: Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom (ars technica)

>You're confused about how this works. This isn't a criminal trial. The jury doesn't decide the case, they decide the facts. The question of whether APIs are copyrightable is not a "fact", it's an interpretation, and the judge will decide that.

Given the question of whether APIs are copyrightable is not the issue, and given that the question of whether Google's usage falls within fair use is also separate, it seems that the only question the jury were asked to consider is 'did any Java code (where 'code' includes headers) go into Dalvik?'

What I'm not seeing is any way the jury could have decided 'no'. This doesn't even seem to be contested; of course the header definitions were copied. What was the point of asking the question in the first place if everyone already agrees on the answer?

Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 10, 2012 14:58 UTC (Thu) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link]

Thank you! That was exactly what I was wondering.

Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 10, 2012 15:31 UTC (Thu) by ajross (guest, #4563) [Link] (1 responses)

> What was the point of asking the question in the first place if everyone already agrees on the answer?

Because it's a court case, not a debate, and courts have rules. Among them is the requirement that issues of fact (like whether or not infringement occurred) must be decided by a Jury.

You seem to be upset that the question was "unfair". Of course it was: facts aren't fair, they're just facts. No one sane would have found otherwise. But the Jury still had to issue a finding.

Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Posted May 14, 2012 10:27 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>You seem to be upset that the question was "unfair". Of course it was: facts aren't fair, they're just facts. No one sane would have found otherwise. But the Jury still had to issue a finding.

I think you have me confused for somebody else. I'm not upset at all; I'm just trying to understand the point of this - I wasn't previously aware that facts which are not in dispute still had to be decided by a jury (in this country we wouldn't even have a jury in this case).