[pgsbathhouse]

Google's arguments were already refuted in the earliest hearings. There's a reason this is going to the supreme court, the rulings didn't really match up with accepted evidence and testimony of experts in the court.

Google will lose this. You don't explicitly copy code, take other people's engineers after exiting licensing talks with the company you took from, and have it not be about stealing someone else's intellectual efforts.

The courts have already explicitly denied Google's claim they did this for compatibility or interoperability. The grey area is how much damage Google has done to Oracle, and it's hard to put an explicit price on that. But given the popularity of Android and how Google's has massively benefited from the platform, in no small thanks to the development community around it, and given the absolutely morbid failure of its other community dev efforts it's not really hard to see that Android wouldn't be what it is today without Java; having a familiar platform for developers to code against is priceless (but not legally).

Google wanted all the benefits of using Java without actually paying for it.

Sun put a lot, and I mean a lot of money into Java. Java had well defined licensing terms for how to use their code. Oracle bought Java. Oracle has the rights to license and price their code however they want. Google does not. Google was in talks with Oracle to license Java but backed out when they didn't want to pay to use it. Instead Google took engineers from the company they copied code from, and re-licensed said code.

It's black and white but people's blind hate for Oracle leads them down an argument or view point the courts have already denied and are now ignoring.

Don't sacrifice your principles for some cheap hit against Oracle. If Google can just throw their man power around to ignore your license, your open source license will not matter. You will not get credit for the work you do. Google and others can just feel like they don't want to abide by your license, take your code, and re-license it however they want. It's already hard to enforce any type of open source licence but if Google comes out on top it really won't matter moving forward. That is what is at stake here.

"What we’ve actually been asked to do (by Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin]) is to investigate what technical alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome. We’ve been over a bunch of these, and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need." - Email from Tim Lindholm, a Google Engineer

From the most recent hearing:

"Ultimately, we find that, even assuming the jury was unpersuaded that Google acted in bad faith, the highly commercial and non-transformative nature of the use strongly support the conclusion that the first factor weighs against a finding of fair use." - https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco20180327178

[danShumway]

This is objectively, very definitively false.

> You don't explicitly copy code

Google didn't copy code. Even if you believe that APIs are copyrightable, Google's clean-room implementation hasn't been part of the case for years. It's just about the API now.

If you want to make an argument that APIs are copyrightable, fine, make that argument. Make the argument that Google is infringing on Oracles API. But if you're trying to accuse Google of copying code, you're wrong. You're conflating two ideas that are not related.

> It's black and white but people's blind hate for Oracle leads them down an argument or view point the courts have already denied and are now ignoring.

If this was actually as black and white as you say, the Supreme court wouldn't have agreed to hear it, they would have just allowed the lower court decision to stand. Unless you believe that Ruth Bader Ginsburg blindly hates Oracle for some reason?

[pgsbathhouse]

>Google didn't copy code.

Yes they did.

[danShumway]

No, they didn't. If you're referring to the infamous 9 lines of code:

  private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {
     if (fromIndex > toIndex)
          throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
               ") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
     if (fromIndex < 0) 
          throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
     if (toIndex > arrayLen) 
          throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
  }

that was removed in Android 4.0 and is no longer being litigated as part of the case. Google is not being sued for stealing code -- Oracle agreed way back in 2012 not to pursue statuary damages for those lines.

The appeal courts reversal of Alsups decision in 2014 was on the basis of copying the API. They wrote "that the overall structure of Oracle's API packages is creative, original, and resembles a taxonomy"[0].

You're conflating two separate issues, copying implementation code vs copying an API -- copying the implementation was resolved in 2012. Copying the API is still being litigated. If you have a docket or ruling or source that says otherwise, then of course feel free to list it.

Or if you want to make the argument that declarative headers for an API are technically code, then... OK, whatever, fine. But it's still wildly deceptive to conflate declarative code and implementation code without mentioning that the law has treated them separately for decades. You're making it sound to a normal reader like Google wholesale lifted implementation logic from Java, which is just not what happened.

[0]: https://www.leagle.com/decision/infco20140509135

[pgsbathhouse]

>copying implementation code vs copying an API

You said code. Not implementation code.

[jcranmer]

> Google's arguments were already refuted in the earliest hearings. There's a reason this is going to the supreme court, the rulings didn't really match up with accepted evidence and testimony of experts in the court.

This is not how appeals works. The Supreme Court is obliged to cover just two questions presented in the petition for cert: (1) Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface; and (2) whether, as the jury found, the petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use.

The reason why it's hearing this case is because precedent on every circuit appeals court other than the federal circuit has answered "no" to the first question, and the precedent of fair use interpretation is such that CAFC overturning the jury verdict to rule not-fair-use is incredibly surprising.

> The courts have already explicitly denied Google's claim they did this for compatibility or interoperability.

That is factually incorrect. Whether or not Google did it for compatibility or interoperability is a factual determination. And facts are determined by jury, not by courts (and definitely not appeal courts). CAFC overturned the jury verdict, which found that Google's use was fair use. And Oracle does not contend that the jury was given bad instructions, which means that the appeals court can only consider if the jury's verdict was unreasonable.

> Google wanted all the benefits of using Java without actually paying for it.

I do not dispute this, and I don't think anyone disputes this. But the question is if it is legal for Google to do what it did... and the contention of quite literally everybody but Oracle is that it is.

> Google was in talks with Oracle to license Java but backed out when they didn't want to pay to use it.

Google was in talks with Sun, not Oracle. Sun didn't pursue Google because they couldn't find evidence of copyright violation. (As has been pointed out, many Sun engineers do suspect that Google didn't follow clean room implementation procedures strictly, but the amount of copied code that even Oracle could dredge up is 8 test files and a 10-line method called rangeCheck--not worth pursuing).

If you're making an emotional case based on the investment put into Java, you should be honest that Oracle bought Sun to acquire Java, in large part to sue Google for the use of Java in Android.

[russellbeattie]

You're description of the history is 100% correct. Legally, who knows, but you've got what actually happened 100% correct.

There are no good guys in this situation. The cynicism on both sides is astounding. One company outright stole work and negotiated in bad faith, and another tried to take advantage of that in the courts, which threatens to set a horrible precedent about APIs if they win.

Everything about this stinks.