Many of the quotes in the article suggest that the Sun people really thought that there current system was a credible solution for the mobile space. Anyone who has ever used Java on mobile is going to have a hard time swallowing that one.
If their argument boils down to "well, they should have agreed to make their system just as shitty as the rest of our systems so that they could be crappily compatible" then it's not hard to see why Google went a different direction.
But with his closing argument, Google counsel Robert Van Nest insisted that the search giant was well within its rights in building its own version of Java, claiming “fair use” of Oracle’s copyrights.
Google's defense is incredibly weak. relying mostly on fair use.
the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
> There is one thing the jury won't know: the issue of whether APIs can be copyrighted at all is actually up in the air. It's a legal gray area that will be decided by Judge William Alsup—but only after the jury gives its verdict in this case. (When that happens, even a jury verdict in Oracle's favor could be a hollow one.)
That is awful. Honestly, the idea of APIs, and not their implementation, being copyrighted makes no sense to me, since it goes against the fundamental principle behind copyright law (versus patent law).
If a juror genuinely believes that the idea of copyrighting APIs and extending that copyright to alternate implementations makes no sense, how can they come up with a decision that's anything but arbitrary? That's like me saying, 'Assume that 1 * 5 = 0, and then decide if if the satisfiability problem can be solved in linear time'.
If you give me a nonsensical set of assumptions, how can I come up with an answer that's not also nonsensical? If you give me some messed up numerical system like that one, well sure, maybe those definitions would propagate though to the definition of polynomial complexity as well. But what does that mean for the real world? Nothing - and law is meant to be applied, not some abstract theoretical exercise.
Except that you can't copyright a language specification - just the implementation of it. And even if you could, copyright law wouldn't prevent you from re-implementing it!
I mean, look at it this way - GNU is almost completely compatible with Unix, but it was rebuilt from the ground up. Even if AT&T hadn't given out the license for free, you'd have a hard time convincing me that GNU breaks some sort of copyright - the entire damn codebase was rewritten from the ground up. The design of the operating system may be the same, but copyrighting that is as ridiculous as patenting a geometric shape.
If their argument boils down to "well, they should have agreed to make their system just as shitty as the rest of our systems so that they could be crappily compatible" then it's not hard to see why Google went a different direction.