Not content with making fools of themselves, the folks over at Oracle are having another poke about Android being copyright theft of their Java. They’ve filed with the US Federal Circuit Appeals Court in an attempt to overturn their loss when Judge William H. Alsup of the US District Court ruled that Google was not infringing upon Oracle’s copyright of Java, mainly on the basis that APIs are not covered under copyright.

More specifically, copyright does not protect “names, titles, short phrases or expressions”, including, “catchwords, catchphrases, mottoes, slogans, or short advertising expressions.” Those are covered under trademark law, not copyright law, and it’s a whole different ballgame.

Also not protected by copyright law are, “listing of ingredients, as in recipes, labels, or formulas.” Which in software terms is the same thing as APIs.

So on these grounds, copyright does not cover APIs.

Hence Google hasn’t infringed Oracle’s copyrights by using the Java APIs in Android.

So ruled Judge Alsup.

The court of law set its standards for modern interpretation of aged laws not designed with software engineering in mind.  And frankly, pretty much everyone but Oracle agrees with this, gets it, and is perfectly content with it that way.

But losing once wasn’t enough for Oracle. They’re adamant that their misinterpretations of law are correct and so they’re appealing that decision.  Which, in theory, they have the right to do.

Of course having potentially billions of dollars at stake might have something to do with their pig-headedness.

But I’m starting to think it’s more of a mental deficiency, to be honest.  Here’s how Oracle’s appeal begins:

Ann Droid wants to publish a bestseller. So she sits down with an advance copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – the fifth book – and proceeds to transcribe. She verbatim copies all the chapter titles – from Chapter 1 (“Dudley Demented”) to Chapter 38 (“The Second War Begins”). She copies verbatim the topic sentences of each paragraph, starting from the first (highly descriptive) one and continuing, in order, to the last, simple one (“Harry nodded.”). She then paraphrases the rest of each paragraph. She rushes the competing version to press before the original under the title: Ann Droid’s Harry Potter 5.0. The knockoff flies off the shelves.

J.K. Rowling sues for copyright infringement. Ann’s defenses: “But I wrote most of the words from scratch. Besides, this was fair use, because I copied only the portions necessary to tap into the Harry Potter fan base.”

Obviously, the defenses would fail.

Defendant Google Inc. has copied a blockbuster literary work just as surely, and as improperly, as Ann Droid – and has offered the same defenses.

Clearly, the state of mind over at Oracle must be questioned if this is their idea of how to write a lawsuit.

The ironic thing is that Oracle’s cute little story of little miss Ann Droid in no way re-examines how APIs should be protected under copyright. It appears that Oracle seems to think that they’ve somehow made a point here, but it only goes to show just how much they’ve actually missed the point, in my opinion. Because essentially their little story of Ann Droid is exactly what anyone working with APIs would and has had to do, by definition. You could no more sue Libre Office for reverse-engineering Word document reading, or Foxit for PDF viewing, or Linux’s Samba and Wine for writing Windows API names and recipes for that matter.

Oracle’s whole short story of Ann Droid centers on writing a book, not on APIs.  And seems focused on confusing the laws of copyright, of trademark, and potentially even of patent depending on how you try to interpret what they’re saying and how it could possibly relate to software.

And, in fact, anti-competitive lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft for not documenting their Windows APIs more clearly. (Sometimes if at all.)  To intentionally block competitors from using APIs is not kosher.

So how Oracle can somehow think that they’re special and that their APIs are copyrightable is beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend.

But writing a short story about Ann Droid writing a Harry Potter knock-off is a whole new level of WTF?!  It’s childish.  It’s apples to oranges.  It’s ignorant.

Again, Oracle doesn’t seem to comprehend where one law ends and the next begins. They seem to think that trademark law and patent law are all a part of copyright law now, as if the three weren’t completely different things.

But then maybe it’s not gross incompetence / ignorance after all, so much as just desperation.  Surely they must know that without a shadow of a doubt they’d lose hands down in a patent law battle, and likewise in a trademark battle. Copyright is the only battleground left that they can even remotely try to claim, and that’s still the longest of long-shots as that is also a clear and obvious lose for them. But with potentially billions of dollars at stake, I guess Oracle figures that it’s worth the chance to play the part of complete and utter fools … just in case they somehow magically conjure up a courtroom equally as foolish. Which, let’s face it, just ain’t gonna happen, even if they try to invoke the magic of Harry Potter.

Frankly, I hope the appellate court slaps them down hard. These ridiculous antics of Oracle are demeaning to the whole judicial system and to software developers alike. But then with so much Java egg on their face already when it comes to security and patches lately, maybe Oracle figures that they’re already chock-full-o’-idiocy, so why not got that extra mile and become the laughing stock of everyone?

I can honestly see a future where no one uses Java anymore not because of security concerns, but because they simple no longer want to have anything to do with Oracle.

Does Apple expect to somehow magically turn up evidence that they did not collude with book publishers to fix the prices of electronic books? With Macmillan joining in with everyone else now (except Apple) and settling with the US Department of Justice in the electronic-book price-fixing lawsuit, that means every single paper publisher has settled. No one has claimed guilt or innocence in their settlements, and now that they’ve settled, they never will be found innocent or guilty in a trial.

Except for Apple, it seems.

The one and only party to continue to plead themselves innocent and fight on.

It’s hard to believe that this lawsuit has drug on since April of 2012 when the case and evidence is pretty straight forward. A part of the terms of Apple’s contract with book publishers to make their e-books available through Apple was quite clear and simple: The ebooks could not be sold elsewhere for less. Prices had to be identical (or more) to Apple.

If that isn’t the very definition of “price fixing” then I clearly don’t know what is!

You can’t really say that all of the other publishing houses agree on that, as by settling they completely avoid having to admit any culpability and with that magic escape hatch from the trial can neither be found guilty … nor innocent, I would point out. However, it now can be said that not a single publishing house thought that the court case was one worth risking being found guilty during.  Not a single publishing house thought that the lawsuit was worth fighting.

Except for Apple.

The lone warrior.

Adamant in their innocence.

And it’s beginning to look like as the only one actually new to book publishing, Apple is perhaps the only one of the lot of alleged colluders  to not fully understand the laws involved?

Now that Apple finds themselves all alone it should be interesting to see how long their continue to tilt at windmills before caving in and settling. Because we all know, Apple can’t possibly let this lawsuit actually come to completion, not when the very contract that they wrote up is all of the evidence that anyone needs to decide on a verdict of guilty.

On the plus side, now that no one is swallowing Apple’s bitter pill anymore, expect the last of the e-book prices to return to sane levels again.  Except, of course, for those from Apple, who wouldn’t know competitive pricing even if it bit a chunk out of their logo.

A wildly hilarious story about Bruce Willis suing Apple hit Ye Olde Interwebs, and like so many things you hear on the internet, it just wasn’t true. Just because random people that you don’t know claim something is true, especially on the internet, doesn’t actually make it reality.

But while Bruce Willis may not be suing Apple, do dead men still gift no tales? That’s the one nagging question left behind: Just what exactly does happen to my tunes if I kick the bucket?

The answer is actually quite simple: Nothing.

As in nothing will ever happen to those files ever again. No listening to them, ever. No usage. No copying. No gifting. No transference to friends or loved ones. Nothing. The rights to listen to those tunes are just as dead as the figurative you.

This is one area where the law is actually pretty consistent, clear, and completely nonsensical. Where you can see the clear delineation between laws written in years past when our government at least pretended to be “for the people”, and laws written today under the influence of the reelection campaign funds graciously provided by fat corporate lobbyists.

The law is pretty clear. You can buy a book, a movie, a song, whatever. If you buy it in physical form, such as a paperback novel, a Blu-Ray disc, a CD, or what have you, then you have rights to gift, lend, or even sell that physical media. You can give it to your Uncle. You can sell it on eBay. No worries. Physical is as physical does.

But if you dare to “buy” (and because of the laws regarding, I use that term extremely loosely) an eBook, a downloaded movie, a streamed song, you have one and only one right, for you and only you to view/listen. That’s it. You can’t give, resell, trade, copy, etc. to anyone else. No one else has the right but you to enjoy that “purchase”. So long as you have no physical media, so long as it was an electronic transaction only, you and only you have rights to that file, and those rights are extremely limited. Often you can’t even back it up or transfer it to a different medium, even though everyone allegedly still has a right to do that.

Now, in some rare cases, you might actually have the “right” to use that file on as many as five whole devices, so long as you jump through the necessary hoops to pretend that you’re you using it on all of those devices, and those devices are all compatible. You might even have a “right” to make a backup copy to a physical medium … so long as you then treat that physical backup as if it had none of the rights as if you’d bought it that way in the first place. (In other words a “backup” CD of your downloaded music is in no way granted the same rights to lend, give, or resell as a purchased CD.)

And it doesn’t matter if your downloaded file was DRMed or not. Unless a copyright owner specifically says otherwise and grants you permission to copy their files, digital media is by default uncopyable, untransferrable, unresellable, etc.

If you read your Terms and Conditions, you’d already know this. Not that anyone ever does. You’d also known that Apple owns your soul, Microsoft your wallet, and Facebook the movie and novel rights to your life story … should Oprah ever be interested.

And to my knowledge, neither Bruce Willis nor anyone else has ever planned to, nor actually succeeded, in bringing any such lawsuit about this to court.

But someone really should, because this digital divide is ludicrous.

Frankly, it is these lack of rights that prevents me from being a digital consumer. Personally, I tend to not support any business model designed around stripping me of rights and robbing my family. Call me crazy if you like, but this is why I buy the book instead of the eBook. It’s for this reason alone that I buy the DVD or Blu-Ray disc instead of the download. And this is why I’m one of the rare few who will actually still buy the CD and rip the tracks rather than buy the song or album through iTunes. (Well, that and I’m really not a fan of Apple, but that’s a different rant all-together.)

Heck, it’s for this reason that I have my own website instead of a Facebook page.

Call me old fashioned all you like, but at the end of the day when I have more rights than you, who gets the last laugh? My family who inherits all of my physical content, or your family who inherits nothing, because the rights to your electronic purchases died with you? Meanwhile my friends and family can borrow a book or a movie any time they’d like, while yours have to buy them. And I can even give it to them permanently if they enjoyed it more than I did, or if I’m just feeling nice.

You can clearly see who’s the one who made sure the laws work out the way that they do. If you’re paying anywhere near the same price, then why in the world shouldn’t you get the same rights?

The prices are typically locked to the highest common denominator instead of the lowest, so that even if a book is in paperback print the eBook still costs the hardback price. There’s no money spent by not having to print / stamp / or otherwise produce any physical medium. And all the while, you lose rights so that legally everyone has to pay for their own individual copy. There’s no more household copy. There’s no more borrowing, gifting, or reselling. Legally, everyone has to purchase their own copy. At the same or higher price. It’s the digital scam.

Most people have likely even forgotten about it, but Oracle’s lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement of their Java source code is finally going to trial.

Yes, that’s right. The trial never even began yet. Has yet to begin. Will not have begun. Etc.

Well … until now.

That’s right. The gloves have come off. Negotiations have failed. It’s time for the courtroom.

And what happens next could invariably change the course of the world. Or at least US copyright law.

Though a lot has been said and done, the heart of the matter revolves around the Java API. Oracle seems to be trying to claim that the API itself is actually copyrightable. Google, having implemented their own copy of the Java API into Android, is of course against this notion.

It’s potentially a tricky subject. Not because it’s actually all that tricky, but because no one has ever really tried such a bone-headed defense of an API before.

You see, the thing is, copyright protects content. The lines of code in the source code files that make up a computer program, for example. Those specific words (and numbers, and so forth) in that specific order is what copyright protects. If someone says the same thing, but in a different way, using different words to give the same meaning, copyright does not protect that.

Which is what make summaries and even reverse engineering possible, legal, and quite often fruitful.

This is where patent law comes in. You patent an idea. You copyright the content. It’s a clear division.

And maybe Google should have licensed Java from Oracle, to save themselves from any patent disputes.

Oracle, however, is contending that API (Application Programming Interface) is copyrightable.

Which is utter nonsense. The API is the description of how to use the system, not source code. Not content. Not copyrightable. API would fall under patent at best, and even that isn’t really true because API isn’t even an idea, a specific means, nor an exact formula. API is just a handshake. API is the instruction manual. It is neither the idea, nor the implementation, nor the content.

And that is the dangerous part of this trial. Whether or not Google violated Oracle patents is one matter. Whether or not Google specifically copied Java source code line-for-line to violate copyright is another matter.

But the heart of this trial is about neither of those side issues. The heart of this trial is about whether or not the API can be covered under copyright law. Right now, no one in their right mind would expect that it could be. But should the trial set a deranged precedent to protect APIs under copyright, it would shake the very foundations of every single computer programmer’s life and business model.

If you’ve been ready to chuck your iPhone 4S across the room because Siri has gone senile, rest assured, you’re not the only one. Apple’s other Steve, Steve Wozniak, has even noticed Siri is no longer performing up to par.

The Woz is quoted as stating, “I used to ask Siri, ‘What are the five biggest lakes in California?’ and it would come back with the answer. Now it just misses. It gives me real estate listings. I used to ask, ‘What are the prime numbers greater than 87?’ and it would answer. Now instead of getting prime numbers, I get listings for prime rib, or prime real estate. I’ll be saying, over and over again in my car, ‘Call the Lark Creek Steak House,’ and I can’t get it done.”

So what has happened cause Siri’s schizophrenia? Why is she acting so differently today than when Apple first released the iPhone 4S about half a year ago?

There are two lines of thought. The first being that Siri, allegedly, is beta. As in code not finished yet, released to users only for testing to find bugs. Now, I would highly debate Apple’s claim that Siri is in fact still in beta because she’s being advertised as the major selling point of the iPhone 4S. She’s being released on every single phone. There is no install. There is no lack of Siri. She is part of the iPhone 4S platform and marketing. That’s not beta. That’s release 1.0.

But, regardless of Siri’s test or release status, Apple clearly knew that she still had issues. (Anyone who doesn’t speak flawless American English already knows that much.) Perhaps Apple has made some changes to Siri since her release which have impacted her intelligence.

The other logical leap to Siri’s senility is simply her servers. How many iPhones were running Siri when Apple first started touting her tangibility? Compare that to how many people are Speaking To Siri now. We know that Siri doesn’t actually think using your iPhone. She’s a server-based app and does all of her thinking in the cloud. Whether her servers are just plain overloaded from an iPhone Frenzy, or if Apple actually throttled back her computational time on them, it hardly makes a difference. Either way could be akin to lobotomizing the lass. Without enough server time to think of the right answer, then she’d be much more prone to give you the wrong one. Or none at all.

Either way, Woz isn’t the only one disappointed with Siri’s recent digital dementia. Enter Frank M. Fazio, represented by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP, and his class-action lawsuit against Apple, which basically boils down to “intentional misrepresentation”. (Though it wouldn’t be a proper lawsuit without a handful of related claims thrown in for good measure.)

Basically, Frank, like Woz, has noticed that the sensational Siri surfer has most definitely lost her spunk. He claims that Apple has failed to deliver as advertised. And without Siri, what is even the point of an iPhone 4S?

(Umm … a dual-core processor, a better camera, a better camera lens, higher-resolution video recording, video stabilization, Bluetooth 4.0, more storage capacity … just to name a few.  But why get technical?)

Are you unhappy with Siri? Is your iPhone 4S just an iPhone4 without her? I guess the courts will decide.