Tag Archives: legal

Copyright in APIs

The Jury in the Oracle vs. Google case has decided that Google violated Oracle’s copyright in implementing the Java APIs. Now, that’s actually not too bad of news, because the Judge in the case told the jury to “assume APIs are copyrightable for this decision” but that he would eventually decide that independently. Given that the EU just ruled they are not, I’m hoping the judge in this case comes to the same conclusion.

If APIs are ruled copyrightable, this would break all kinds of interoperability that we take for granted today. As always, groklaw has the best coverage of this legal action.

Mashable: Who Owns Your Data?

But as we use the Internet for “free,” we have to remember that if we’re not paying for something, we’re not the customer. We are in fact the product being sold — or, more specifically, our data is.

So here’s a tricky question: Who owns all that data?

While nothing ground breaking is in this article, it’s probably one of the better summaries of the complex space around that question.

The end of the software patent cold war

“Would you like to play a game?”

It looks like the software patent cold war that we were in is over, and we’re now moving into a software patent hot war.  Ars Technica has a piece on Paul Allen’s IP holding company suing 11 big internet giants.  This comes after a number of large patent suits, including Oracle v Google, Nokia v Apple, Apple v HTC.

I’m hoping that we actually get another case in front of the supreme court for them to rethink punting on deciding on software patents.

Isn’t this what we were afraid Microsoft would do?

There is one main reason people in the open source community get so violent over Mono (the open source .NET implementation): the fear that Microsoft could shut everything.  There is long standing fear that MS has patents on core parts of the system.  People were afraid their investments in software written on top of it would be at risk.  Java was always held up as the much safer choice, with a longer legacy, being more open source friendly, with a company behind it that everyone trusted.  Of course, companies change hands some times….

Oracle sues Google for patent, copyright infringement

Oracle filed a complaint in federal court in California, alleging the infringement of seven patents and copyrights by Google’s Android mobile operating system software.

I was once told that Sun actually made money off Java, and one of the big sources of revenue was the J2ME market, which is what all those dumb little snake games are written in.  Google has undercut that by making a really popular cell phone platform with a version of Java they wrote themselves.

It’s still not a good world to be in, where innovation comes with a 10% patent tax.

Coke uses the Chewbacca defence

First, this is a really good piece of information, which I don’t want to be buried by the “wha.. wha.. WHA!” moment:

The truth is that when it comes to weight loss, what you drink may be even more important than what you eat. Americans now get nearly 25 percent of their calories from liquids. In 2009, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, finding that the quickest and most reliable way to lose weight is to cut down on liquid calorie consumption. And the best way to do that is to reduce or eliminate beverages that contain added sugar.

Basically, put down the soda, get yourself a glass of water instead.

And now the context for why that popped up in an article:

Now here’s something you wouldn’t expect. Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group, on the grounds that the company’s vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. No surprise there. But how do you think the company is defending itself?

In a staggering feat of twisted logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the lawsuit by asserting that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.

Really?  For the record vitamin water has roughly the same amount of added sugars as a soda of the same size.