[maz20]

No suprise here --- 1) Google won the first case with Alsup. This demonstrates that some lower courts can have a better understanding of the law and are willing to spend time applying logic to these things. 2) Oracle won in a higher court. At this point, we see a trend that the higher you go, the more political and less competent the courts get. The DOJ's actions reinforce this trend too. So, even if it goes to the Supreme Court, we're pretty much guaranteed Oracle will win that too.

See, the whole problem of this case rests in that you have to "spend time" and "apply logic" to agree with Google's position. Which, pretty much throws out any hope of getting a "higher court" (or higher-anybody) to adopt Google's stance on the issue.

Actually the poster "tajen" pretty much hit the nail on the head for this issue -- essentially, adopting Google's stance unfortunately requires a degree of competence and logical commitment beyond the comprehension of most higher officials. So, even if this goes to the Supreme Court Oracle has this case pretty much won...

[dragonwriter]

> 2) Oracle won in a higher court. At this point, we see a trend that the higher you go, the more political and less competent the courts get.

I don't know that that's the case; even if we assume that the CAFC is wrong from the perspective of application of the law (rather than merely correctly applying the law to reach an outcome that we don't like), certainly, lots of observers think that the CAFC is an especially problematic court among Courts of Appeal, and even on the issues that it specializes in (which copyright is not one of; Oracle v. Google got there instead of the 9th Circuit because of patent issues in the case, even though the thing we're all focused on is a copyright issue.)

So, I don't think that "the CAFC messed this up", even if taken as gospel, necessarily demonstrates a relation between "level" of court and competence.

> The DOJ's actions reinforce this trend too.

Since the DoJ isn't a higher court than the CAFC, I don't see how you can reasonably say that.

[maz20]

DOJ is not a court but it is a "high official" (or "official body"). What I was stating was that the "higher you go" -- in terms of official government bodies, whether they're courts, or something else -- the less competent I would expect them to be.

You can simply say, 1) "Oracle owns Java" 2) "APIs are part of Java" 3) "Google uses Java APIs" 4) Therefore, "Google uses something Oracle owns" so Oracle should win this case

Now of course, you can apply some deeper logic to uphold Google's stance. But that's the problem --- how "far" or how "deeper" do you expect the higher courts to look into this issue? Deep enough to understand Google's position?

[dragonwriter]

> You can simply say, 1) "Oracle owns Java" 2) "APIs are part of Java" 3) "Google uses Java APIs" 4) Therefore, "Google uses something Oracle owns" so Oracle should win this case

You could, but neither CAFC nor DoJ did, so that's irrelevant.

> Now of course, you can apply some deeper logic to uphold Google's stance.

Or you could apply deeper logic and still uphold Oracle's stance. Now, I tend to think the District Court decision here was more correct than the CAFC decision (or the DoJ position), but I don't think as a legal decision its as clearly correct as some people would like to claim -- even though its also the outcome I prefer independent of what is correct under the current law.

> But that's the problem --- how "far" or how "deeper" do you expect the higher courts to look into this issue?

Fairly deeply on the legal side -- that's what appellate courts exist to do, and they are generally fairly good at it (though they do fail spectacularly at times, but not worse than trial courts, though with higher courts they get more attention for it) -- perhaps less so on the factual side (again, this is by design -- and why appellate courts often resolve legal disputes and send the factual matters back to the trial courts to resolve given the legal clarification.)

> Deep enough to understand Google's position?

I don't think the CAFC or DoJ failed to understand Google's position. Disagreement isn't the same thing as lack of understanding.