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I think you've bought into the hype here prematurely. The odds that this issue will be in any way significant to the outcome of this case seem low. Did you read Oracle's reply[1] or just the caricature at the original link? "Google argues that the entire Java platform is necessarily the “work as a whole” because that is what was registered with the Copyright Office. Courts have soundly rejected that argument.. As explained in Los Angeles Times v. Free Republic, supra: Defendants contend that plaintiffs' “work” is the entire daily newspaper because their copyright registration covers the paper as a whole rather than any particular article. Thus, they assert, copying an individual article constitutes reproduction of only a small portion of the entire work. This proposition is not supported by the case law. See Texaco, supra, 60 F.3d at 925-26 (copying an entire article from a journal where the copyright registration covered the journal as a whole constituted a copying of the entire work); Hustler Magazine, supra, 796 F.2d at 1155 (finding that “[a] creative work does not deserve less copyright protection just because it is part of a composite work” and holding that the copying of a one-page parody from a 154-page magazine constituted a copying of the entire work); Netcom On-Line II, supra, 923 F.Supp. at 1247 (“although many of Hubbard's lectures, policy statements, and course packets are collected into larger volumes, and registered as a whole, they may still constitute separate works for the purposes of this factor”); Lerma, supra, 1996 WL 633131 at *9 (“we find that the Works at issue in this case are combined in ‘collections' and that each subpart must be considered a ‘single work’ for the purposes of fair use analysis”)."
[1] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120426075025438#9... |