>It is hard to see how GPL can survive such a result. In fact, it is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result. Software businesses now must accelerate their move to the cloud where everything can be controlled as a service rather than software. Consumers can expect to find decreasing options to own anything for themselves, decreasing options to control their data, decreasing options to protect their privacy.

>Google is an advertising company. It does not depend upon traditional software licensing and is therefore free to disregard the protections that traditional software licensing provides.

>You should have been on Oracle's side in this fight. Free stuff from Google does not mean free in the sense Richard Stallman ever intended it.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/op-ed-oracle-attorney-says-googles-court-victory-might-kill-the-gpl/

This is so fucking stupid, Google made their own implementation of Java.
They're fully within their right to do so.

This article just reeks of oracle damage control.

>>54778698
I don't care so much about the GPL, I just say "You can freely distribute this program and modified versions of it, by doing so you are never tied to legal stuff as having to make your software free like in the GPL."

Oracle is the company that took free software and made it proprietary. I seriously doubt they give a fuck about the GPL

>In other words, if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use.
Except this is wrong. Google took no software from Oracle. They implemented software according to Oracle's APIs. APIs aren't software, they are contracts that software fulfills.

>>54778763
Oracle's argument was "They took 11,500 lines of code" and Google's said it was open source so they can use it. Google made an implementation of the JVM called Dalvik but the JVM is GPL'd so all derivatives have to follow the GPL, Including Android. Google literally just beat the GPL... First they came for the JVM, next is the Linux Kernel. You will see a fully closed source Linux in your lifetime.

The issue at hand is API, not code.

>>54779606
Exactly. I fail to see how this will affect GPL and its users at all. Implementing APIs has nothing to do with free software , its just code.

>>54779659
Copying a spec not constituting a derivative work is a well established legal principle. Otherwise, there's a whoooole lot of cleanroom reverse engineered stuff that's infringing.

Literally not a single software developer thought Oracle would even win the first case. Fuck off lawyer shills.

>>54778698
GPL was a shit license anyway. MIT and BSD ftw.

>GPL
>not CC+ BY-SA with additional CC0 permissions applicable 10 years after publishing date
It's like you don't even want sane copyright law.

>>54778698
google shits on the developer world to save a few shekels. bravo google.

>>54779862
This is the preferred outcome of this case actually. If Oracle won they would have the ability to go after other organizations that reimplement the Java APIs. It would also open up the door for other organizations to do the same. Oracle is no defender of free software, they're personally I find them to be a dispicable company for what they did to the opensolaris community

>microsoft's anti-GNU spin on a sensible verdict
Go fuck yourself, Microsoft. That's not what it means at all.

Jesus fuck, Microsoft, you're so fucking mad your days are numbered because of your own stupidity, aren't you? Are you proud you're trolling a board made for the lowest common denominator shitlord children that will never know anything about computing?

Dumbfucks. Don't reply, just report.

when this issue resurfaces I'm sure the courts will turn over the decision that APIs are copyrightable. If an API was copyrightable, what google did certainly wouldn't be fair use. But the decision that they are copyrightable is just plain fucking bonkers. recipe analogy etc.

I was looking into android licensing in regards to Linux being GPLv2 and the google version of Linux being it too. How are they licensing android with Apache licensing that isn't copyleft while it still uses a GPLv2 kernel? Doesn't copyleft still apply here, meaning android should be GPLv2? Or are they pulling some legal fuckery and somehow treating the android OS and the forked linux kernel as seperate pieces of software? Apache license and GPLv2 are incompatible.

>>54780168
The kernel is considered separate for very obvious reasons.

>>54780168
Anything that links with GPL software AND is considered a derivative work must be GPL. GPL doesn't cover software that communicates through APIs. GPL also doesn't cover bundles(several differen't pieces of software with varying licenses)

>>54778698
>This jury's verdict suggests that such restrictions are now meaningless, since disregarding them is simply a matter of claiming "fair use."

Yeah, I wish.
If this were to happen that would mean it's fair use to copy+paste anything on the internet since it's "open" ( as in not a blob only readable by a machine).

Clearly this is not the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_procedure_and_practice

>Fair use is decided on a case by case basis, on the entirety of circumstances. The same act done by different means or for a different purpose can gain or lose fair use status. Even repeating an identical act at a different time can make a difference due to changing social, technological, or other surrounding circumstances

Given how fair use is handled in courts, I don't think this creates a precedent for anything.

This whole trial was a shitshow. But google definitely should not have been able to claim copyright "fair use" for their commercialized product.

I really dont understand how Americans trust their jury system when you can have professional legal experts judging about matters they specialize in like in civilised countries.

>>54778698
>This jury's verdict suggests that such restrictions are now meaningless, since disregarding them is simply a matter of claiming "fair use."
>In fact, it is hard to see how ownership of a copy of any software protected by copyright can survive this result.
so piracy is fair use. leave me and my computer alone

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102
>(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
>procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle
>no ... copyright protection

How the fuck did we even get the first ruling that APIs are copyrightable? An API is not copyrightable by the fucking letter of the goddamn law.

>>54780420

The advantage of having a jury decide on matters, rather than a legal expert, is that it allows for decisions to be made based on what is right, rather than what the law actually says. This is called jury nullification, and while courts do try their best to ensure that juries do not know of their options in this matter (indeed, if you mention you know what it is, it can very easily get you out of jury duty), it nonetheless has been used in the past to fight some unjust laws, such as the fugitive slave act. On the downside, however, it has also been used to get lynch mobs off the hook.

>>54780471

Lawyers not doing their research?
Judge was drunk at the time?

>>54780471
an API is more specific than an idea

One can only hope. The GPL is completely at odds with freedom and needs to go.

>>54778698
If Oracle had won this case, it would have opened the floodgates for litigation all over the PC industry. Literally the entire history of computing is filled with people using other people's ideas, expanding on them, and doing a lot of that without licensing.

A few examples come to mind:

1. MS-DOS, while not a clone of CP/M as some people allege, was designed to be compatible with several of CP/M's API calls. This was done by design, and is exactly the kind of thing Google did with Android. If Google had lost this case, then Digital Research could have gone and used Tim Paterson and Microsoft for a part of every MS-DOS and Windows license ever sold over the last 35 years.

2. Not long after IBM built the model 5150 PC, Eagle and a few other companies thought, "Hey, let's build our own PC's and cash in on this business." They got sued and lost, because they flat-out duplicated IBM's BIOS code. Phoenix, however, duplicated and re-implemented the PC-BIOS API's, creating the first legal PC clone.

3. Pretty much all hypervisors and emulators work by reproducing the API's of the original hardware and firmware they emulate. With a judgement in favor or Oracle, all virtualization becomes suspect and possibly illegal.

Just to make sure people are reading this right, that op-ed was written by one of Oracle's lawyers

if apis were copywritable, any posix compatible kernel is fucked

>imblyign


wtf does this have to do with gpl anyhow?

>>54780529
I think our legal systems are too different to truly compare on their merits. But here in the Netherlands a lower court has no legal obligation to follow a higher court, although its common practice. And judges are appointed for life by the King. So lower judges can just throw things out the window they disagree with. This happens a lot privacy cases.

The Supreme Court doesn't handle factual cases either. So sometimes the supreme court says the law is x and y and refers the case back to the lower court. And then a lower court says: well, x and y dont apply here considering the facts of the case.

>>54780529
Lawmakers not forseeing future technology, let alone the future scumminess of the US government.

Do you really think the founders would have wrote "for limited times" in the copyright clause if they knew courts and lobbyists would work out that a lifetime is limited? Would they even bother knowing that the words "their respective" would be ignored and that the copyright to a work could be bought, transferred, and renewed?

>>54780529
That's not at all a sensible argument in favor of juries; any educated expert could do the exact same act of nullificaton if so desired. A given implementation might not allow for that, but it is not an inherent quality of neither system.
The only difference is that juries will go entirely off Gefühl and know nothing, gambling on their ability to comprehend systems they reasonably cannot be expected to know, as explained by those informing the jury.

It's a stupid system is what I'm saying

>>54781822
Jury can be swayed by emotions pretty easily, not facts and logic but emotion.

Which is a fucking disaster for any kind of trial. Too easy to paint someone in bad light, or do the opposite and try to capitalize on that.

Not to mention that juries do not need to have any idea about the subject of trial - which is a disaster for any tech related trial.