A setback for Google against Oracle

Posted May 15, 2014 19:15 UTC (Thu) by southey (guest, #9466)
Parent article: A setback for Google against Oracle

The "scenes a faire" doctrine — meaning you can't get a copyright on certain expressions if they are "commonplace[,] [...] indispensable [...] and naturally associated with the treatment of a given idea," (page 35) — also doesn't help Google. That's because Google didn't demonstrate that the Java code it used was commonplace and indispensable in that fashion.

This is the problem with the decision that makes any of the good things in the decision pointless. This argument failed the compatibility fact that was brought up a few times during the trial and that Sun (the owners at the time) had endorsed at the time (court seems to have forgotten that aspect). In particular, they hold the double standard that Google is wrong for using functions but those functions are not original to Java. They also appeared to totally ignored that there was no evidence provided that Sun/Oracle ever owned copyrights on those individual APIs - in fact Google showed that they did not as the copyright of Java was actually as a compilation. It also conflicts with established copyright law on recipes by simply providing order - an action that was insufficient to be allow copyrighting.

Of course, this ruling means that whoever wrote the first function carries the copyright for all functions and APIs...