and here i thought it was Do No EVIL!!!
Posted on 03/18/2020 10:14:48 AM PDT by Kaslin
Not for the stated reasons, because computer code by its purpose and by its use properly belongs under patent law rather than copyright law.
The programming industry as a whole - even extending to people choosing to work in that field now deserve to lose anything that they might lose now.
To make it clear, what Sun/Oracle alleges is that they have a set of functions like this:
int doSomething(int param1, int param2)
This is a function called doSomething that takes two integer parameters and returns an integer result.
Under Sun/Oracle's own admission doSomething was re-implemented by Google sight unseen...the actual working code has nothing to do with Sun's code. They are instead alleging that the production of an identical interface (function names, parameters, return values) compatible with Sun's is a violation of copyright law.
This is prima facie absurd.
Google was founded on theft. The search algorithms were stolen. They settled the lawsuit but I always wondered if the government could go after them based on the unversity having used federal funds in research and development.
google was founded by using other people’s property
I despise google. (Using lower key letters on purpose)
Put that way, it’s ridiculous and would set a terrible precedent if awarded.
Well, that wouldn’t make them any different than any of the other big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
Didn’t sun make Java Open Source?
It is. It reeks of the SCO lawsuit.
Personally, I wish they could both lose.
There isn’t a programmer alive that hasn’t stolen code.
Damn devils the lot of em...
“computer code by its purpose and by its use properly belongs under patent law rather than copyright law”
I’d say it kind of depends. If you are creating an entirely new process or way of doing things or architecture, then sure, that should be patentable. However, in writing the code you are simply using an existing language to issue a set of instructions. Whatever new thing you created might be contained or described by those instructions, but the instructions themselves seem more like a matter for copyright law.
That is true. Now ideally, you should steal the code and then try to improve it to make something more efficient that you can call your own invention, but in a rush to get the job done, everyone is just going to steal what they need and worry about it later only if they get caught.
No more true than a different type of wiring harness for a vehicle should be considered a language...which is true to the same degree as the wiring of components delivers power which acts to instruct one component to perform an action.
I have far too much experience in both analog and digital electronics to be bamboozled into assigning any credence to the notion that digital instructions are entitled to any intellectual property protections which analog instructions are not.
This fight was already fought in Compaq vs IBM for the PC BIOS.
APIs are fair game after that fight.
Google must have obtained their idea from congress democrats,wonder if they get sued?.
and here i thought it was Do No EVIL!!!
What Google has done is no different than what the PC clone manufacturers did in duplicating the IBM BIOS - a reimplementation to an existing interference.
We need Google to win this one.
Tech Ping
I do not believe any software should be patentable.
I also don’t think any action done in software, a virtual world, or even physically done in a different setting than previously performed, should be patentable.
In other words, starting a restaurant on the Moon should not create new patent opportunities.
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