Oracle Is Wrong About Having Permission To Reimplement Amazon's API. But They Shouldn't Need It.
from the oracle-wrong?-what-a-surprise dept
Readers of this site no doubt know that Oracle’s arguments in its lawsuit against Google, set to be argued in the Supreme Court on Wednesday, could spell disaster for the computer industry, by turning the act of reimplementing an API into copyright infringement. Back in January, I revealed in an Ars Technica piece that it could even spell disaster for Oracle itself, because Oracle’s cloud storage service reimplements Amazon’s S3 API. Oracle did not dispute my findings but shrugged them off, claiming Amazon had granted permission. I was skeptical, but at the time did not have hard evidence to prove a negative that Oracle had no license.
I’ve now found the evidence for why Oracle should be worried. And more importantly, it shows why every tech company and startup should be worried about the Google v. Oracle case.
What Oracle pointed me to in January was an open source Apache license for Amazon's Java SDK software. This was curious at the time because the SDK doesn’t implement S3 or any other cloud service; it uses the API by calling a handful of its functions. Code that calls an API is distinct from the API itself, so permission to copy API-calling code is not permission to implement an API (assuming, as Oracle does, that you need permission to implement an API). To repurpose a favorite analogy of Oracle’s lawyers, buying the rights to an authorized Harry Potter fanfic does not give one permission to reproduce Chamber of Secrets. Nevertheless, the idea that the SDK license gave Oracle the right to reimplement Amazon’s API continues to circulate among Oracle’s supporters.
The problem is, Amazon itself doesn’t believe it has licensed its cloud API. In 2012, a company called Eucalyptus Systems announced that it had negotiated a license with Amazon to reimplement APIs including S3. Reports of the deal suggest that Amazon was not handing out licenses to just anyone: “Amazon chose to partner with Eucalyptus,” said a representative for the latter company.
The Apache license for the Java SDK has been in place since at least 2010—two years before the Eucalyptus deal. If, as Oracle claims, everyone already had an Apache license to reimplement the S3 API, then there was no reason for Amazon to negotiate out an individual license with Eucalyptus, and there was no reason for Eucalyptus to promote its success in obtaining that license.
In 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by HP, which raised the question of whether the acquired firm's API license would transfer. In reporting on the acquisition, one journalist (who apparently now works for Oracle) quoted an anonymous cloud service vendor who described Amazon as “anything but generous on API licensing.” Again, that would make no sense if Amazon had Apache-licensed reimplementation of its APIs in 2010.
Notably, Amazon's licensing behavior doesn't say much about whether Amazon actually agrees that API reimplementation is copyright infringement. Numerous people have noted that Amazon never has and probably never will bring a copyright case in court. But risk-averse businesses will want certainty—even the CEO of Eucalyptus did not believe that APIs were copyrightable, but still got a license as "belts and suspenders." And many major cloud service vendors have not reimplemented Amazon's APIs despite the obvious benefits of doing so. As one cloud service executive put it in 2014, the Oracle v. Google litigation has made it "more dangerous to use someone’s API design without consulting them first."
Besides poking a massive hole in Oracle’s Apache-license theory, this “consult first” mentality shows how troublesome Oracle’s copyright theory is. Eucalyptus is not a traditional cloud service provider competing head-to-head with Amazon, but rather software for on-premises servers, allowing companies essentially to run a cloud computing system like AWS on their own computers. Amazon is not in the business of deploying on-site enterprise servers, so Eucalyptus would not have undercut Amazon’s profits—in fact, it probably would have increased Amazon’s profits by locking companies into Amazon’s API even before they switch from on-site servers to the cloud.
The permission culture mentality, applied to the computer industry, could end up only locking in consumers, boosting big firms, and shutting out disruptive startups from competing in the market. In evaluating Oracle's theory of API copyright, the Supreme Court could either reject it and open the door to robust competition in the technology space, or approve copyright in APIs and entrench dominant services for years to come.
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Filed Under: apache license, api, copyright, java sdk, reimplementation, s3, s3 api
Companies: amazon, eucalyptus systems, google, hp, oracle
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Hello! You've Been Referred Here
Because Oracle is Wrong About How APIs Work.
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Legal issues that prevent people from making software can only benefit you if you are Oracle.
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Hearing that Oracle vs. Google is about to be going up to bat at the Supreme Court reminds me of how much I very much miss Groklaw. :(
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And Prenda Law, they were source of much amusement.
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Don't insult P.J by comparing her to those clowns at Prenda law.
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It was nice as long as she stuck to the court cases. When she saw shadowy global conspiracies behind any and every disagreement or criticism of the GPL, it would get annoying and tiresome.
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You could have ended the title, and maybe the entire article, with simply Oracle is Wrong.
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Analogies are hard...
As a software engineer, I keep trying to come up with fitting analogies of how crazy it would be to allow copyrights on APIs. None of them work well because they don't get at the nuance of it all.
Its like granting copyrights on just the movie title and DVD chapter names. Hollywood's desire to stick with 1-3 word titles makes it so there are a bunch of non-remakes that have the same title... and if the DVD chapters were just numbers ... yeah, it doesn't quite fit.
Its like granting copyrights on a book's title and index page alone ... but even that is terrible because the chapter titles don't really have meaning and can be changed.
It's like granting copyright on the organization of a cookbook. No longer are you able to group things by breads or desserts and you definitely can't have the order of the chapters the same... so every cookbook writer is going to have to figure out a different way to organize it, and every cook is going to have to relearn how the cookbook arrangement goes when they switch cookbooks... all because Oracle bought an opensource cookbook once and got pissed that other's had learned how to cook from it without paying them.
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It's like...
It's like claiming a screw thread on a bolt is proprietory and anyone making anything that attaches to that bolt needs a license. And nobody else is allowed to make a bolt.
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And it makes no sense for oracle if it gets paid from Google for using an api, it could be sued by amazon or any company whose api it uses,
Google is likely to lose in the supreme Court unless the judges take the time to understand what an api is,
It's like a common menu of words or commands that a program uses to process data,
A car maker uses common screws and bolts and connectors to make a car
Any company can make basic bolts and screws
and connectors without paying a licence to another company and as long as they are a standard size and spec they can be used by any other
company to make any device.
Most company's use very similar button layouts for TV and satellite remotes
Eg channel plus minus volume plus minus
Av 1 av2 menu exit etc
so any user can use the remote without reading a manual
It would be chaos if every remote had to have its
Own unique menu or button layout
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If you love using computers in your business, then never deal with Oracle again. They have never ever been good for business.
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Anyone who knows technology already knows this. You need to find a way of telling that to the non-tech bean counters who get conned by their salespeople.
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"You need to find a way of telling that to the non-tech bean counters who get conned by their salespeople."
Difficult to get a bean-counter to understand that "Hey, the first taste is free!" doesn't necessarily indicate a great business opportunity.
Once you've got the cheap CRM into place the lock-in starts where every time you start investigating the option of choosing between the skyrocketing maintenance/expansion cost and leaving the Oracle walled garden you're confronted with the cost of getting out of the walled garden will narrowly overshoot what you're currently expected to pay.
I'd like to say that as a businessman Ellison takes no hostages...except that's exactly what he does.
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You do know you just gave the sales tactic of most drug dealers, right? First dose is on me often gets the person addicted which is the point.
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It's not impossible. The company I work for has recently outgrown the existing ERP solution and I sat through a presentation really of how they sourced the replacement. There are some Oracle databases at the core of the company, but everything else is done with a criteria of best fit rather than easiest/cheapest. In the presentation, a number of solutions were considered, including 2 Oracle solutions, but the best fit was from a different company.
But, that was a decision made by tech stakeholders in using the platform, and not by someone trying to balance books or justify their cut from a sale.
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Poetic Justice
While the precedent is bad having Oracle be the only ones who need copyright permission for APIs would be just because they are the greedy stupid bastards who pushed the concept in the first place.
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Hello! You've Been Referred Here
Because Oracle is Wrong About How APIs Work.
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Someone should attempt to copyright an API directly, one which has no actual code with which to interface, and see how this goes.
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