Appeals Court Considers Overturning Ruling That APIs Can't Be Covered By Copyright
from the and-on-and-on-it-goes dept
Back in May 2012, Judge William Alsup (yes, he's popular today) issued a very good and very thorough ruling explaining why APIs could not be covered by copyright. Alsup, who claimed he learned to program in Java to better understand the technical details of the case, went into a fair bit of detail in his ruling, which looked like it was clearly designed to explain basic programming concepts to an appeals court who would surely be hearing the case -- and almost certainly with judges who had less (if any) programming knowledge. The appeal was officially heard by the Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) today and there are some reports suggesting that the judges are skeptical of Alsup's ruling and may be leaning towards overturning it. Reading through some of the details it appears that at least one judge is clearly on Oracle's side in believing that APIs can be covered by copyright, while it's not as clear where the other two judges on the panel sit.Given CAFC's history as exceptionally supportive of locking up knowledge and information on the patent side, it wouldn't be terribly surprising if they did so as well on the copyright side (side note: while, normally, copyright cases should travel up the local appeals court route, since this case started as a patent case, even though it ended up as a copyright case, apparently the appeal still goes to CAFC, the court that hears all patent appeals). This is yet another issue with having a court like CAFC, which has long appeared to be captured by those who support a maximalist view of intellectual property.
Still, oral hearings in appeals are not always indicative of how judges are leaning. Reading the tea leaves there is often quite dangerous. The hearing sometimes focus on tangents, or involve judges really trying to test out a particular theory, and final rulings may be more strongly based on the written filings (and, sometimes, briefs from amici -- of which there were quite a few in this case). This case still has a long way to go, but hopefully the appeals court recognizes the careful level of detail that judge Alsup went into in determining that APIs do not deserve copyright protection.
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Filed Under: android, api, cafc, copyright, java
Companies: google, oracle
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The real problem is that seems to be quite possible to find "experts" who'll actually obfuscate the issues to help their side, so judges end up judging factual (or almost factual) issues based on the credibility of two expert witnesses.
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Well, it might make sense in theory. But in practice, it's producing awful results.
So, no. It doesn't make sense after all. It's just a fucked up system that doesn't work right.
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:P
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The mill-run cases produce results that suck the hardest. Ninety-nine percent of the apples in that barrel are rotten.
I think the judiciary almost always performs better under the glare of public scrutiny. But one good apple shined up and sitting pretty on the top of the barrel doesn't save the truckload.
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Yes. The immediate comment to which you replied was a fairly subtle troll, wasn't it?
Early in the 20th Century, the progressive answer to decision-making in an increasingly industrialized society envisioned commissions and boards of independent, neutral experts utilizing modern scientific knowledge to inform their decision-making. That gave us institutions like, for example, the FCC, which if you examine the bios of the current commissioners, is not today led by people who emphasize their Electrical Engineering degrees. It's still an open problem.
The point here is that this society-wide problem has been well-recognized for around a century or so.
Someone who implies that that current system only fails when people look, and works well when no one's looking is�well, it's fairly subtle troll.
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http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/
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Re: copying is copying
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The whole value of a coding language is that other people use it, and computers know how to read it. Granting a patent or copyright on it goes completely against both those goals.
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Oracle Does Not Hold Most Of The Copyrights, to Anonymous Coward #5
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Appeals
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Re: Appeals
The odds that the Supreme Court will grant certiorari in any particular case are extremely low. So extremely low that the CAFC routinely flouts the Supreme Court's controlling decisions. The CAFC judges know they're unlikely to be reversed no matter what they do.
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Re: Appeals
There can be a request to CAFC to rehear the case "en banc" (with a full slate of 11 judges, rather than just a 3 judge panel). That happens sometimes, but it's pretty rare. The ruling would have to be pretty contentious for that to happen...
Then they can request that the Supreme Court hear the case, which is also a long shot since the Supreme Court rejects most such requests. A high profile case hitting on a key point may be of more interest to the Supreme Court, but it's much more likely to take a case if it sees a circuit split in the ruling with other appeals courts. Whether or not that's the case will depend heavily on what the ruling says...
So... yes, there's the possibility of appeals, but also a very real possibility that no such appeals will be heard.
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Re: Appeals
I think this would count as contentious. Alsup worked very hard on his ruling and given the amici that addressed his court I think there would be some very vocal agitation by some very rich corporations.
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The Legal Precedents (to Mike Masnick, #16)
The Supreme Court is not monolithic about copyright, as was revealed in Wiley vs. Kirtsaeng. They will see Oracle's claims as an attempt to turn a copyright into a patent, and shoot it down. The Supreme Court is extremely interventionist when it perceives that a lower court is attempting to systematically resist its rulings. The Supreme Court has a certain reluctance to "upset the apple cart." It tends, when it can, to legitimate the status quo. Hence its rulings in cases involving the duration of copyright, and its rulings in cases involving file-sharing programs and services whose net effect is that anyone can get a copy of anything for free, just as if it were in the public domain, even if it was only published two weeks ago. The classic case of the Supreme Court's reluctance was Dred Scott (1857), and we ultimately had to fight a civil war about _that_. Oracle's claims are not for the preservation of the status quo-- they call for radical changes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott
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Gahhh!
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Hahahahahaha ----- that will never happen!
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What will happen?
Everyone else will find other avenues including no longer using the Oracle Java language. I would then expect to see GPL'ed or Public Domain languages being taken up. Python for example.
Oracle is not exactly renown for its public betterment. They can't even get what it means to have a Relational Database Management System. They hoist an awful system onto us users. Just to clarify, I have been building Oracle based systems since the late 80's. These days I have moved over to PostgreSQL (which is still not a Relational Database Management System) because it is freely available to all.
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Re: What will happen?
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If the appeals court over rules this one case, what happens to all the precedent set by multiple lower courts?
Is CAFC a district court?
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In the U.S. federal system, the U.S. district courts are the trial courts. The U.S. circuit courts of appeal supervise the decisions of the district courts at the intermediate level, under the overall supervision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
�
Precedent is generally divided into two types: pursuasive precedents and binding precedents. Generally, the district courts are bound to follow the holdings of decisions handed down by their own supervising circuit. The decisions of other circuits may pursuade a district court judge, but, on the other hand, the district court might not be pursuaded by some other circuit's decision.
The appellate jurisdiction of the CAFC complicates this simple model. Briefly, the CAFC hears and decides appeals of all patent cases, and their holdings bind all the U.S. district courts on patent matters. On non-patent matters, it's even more complicated. When the CAFC hears and decides a matter that would ordinarily be heard and decided by one of the other circuit courts of appeal, the CAFC should apply the law of that other circuit.
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But of course, you can�t claim copyright infringement because the alleged infringer didn�t copy enough.
I wonder if Google�s lawyers can remind the Appeals Court of this little point?
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Re:
Re-read the order which is being appealed. On p.31, Judge Alsup writes:
(Emphasis added.)
Do you think that's enough of a reminder for the appeals judges? Perhaps their minds have just been made up all along, and their eyes glazed over as they read Judge Alsup's reasoning.
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