A setback for Google against Oracle

Posted May 18, 2014 19:51 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: A setback for Google against Oracle by dlang
Parent article: A setback for Google against Oracle

anything that a computer does is a piece of code

This is a pretty abstract leap of metaphor. And the court in this case and every other one I know of doesn't make it. They say what you said in the rest of your post: that there is a distinction between what a computer does and any piece of code and the former is not the subject of copyright law and the latter is.

The district court said all Google copied was what the computer does, so Google was in the clear. The appeals court said Google copied a bunch of pieces of code, so is not in the clear.

I found it hard to make sense of David Pollack's essay because of the terminology confusion in the word API that I previously mentioned. I note that the court used more specific terminology than "API" in its opinion.

The court seemed to make it clear that one could implement an API with original code and thereby not infringe, but found that Google didn't do that in this case.

(And by the way, the court didn't say copying the pieces of code was an infringement in this case - only that it could be. More trial required).

A setback for Google against Oracle

Posted May 19, 2014 1:49 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

well, they also said that Google admitted to copying, which is not what the court transcripts said.

So there's a lot of ground to cover in the appeals here.