The copyright phase of the Oracle v. Google trial is winding down. While the world waits for a jury verdict on the facts, the judge overseeing the case is wrestling with the complexities of the law. Oracle has argued that the "structure, sequence and organization" of the Java API is eligible for copyright protection, while Google disagrees.
On Thursday, Judge William Alsup asked each party to submit a 20-page brief answering a series of 13 in-depth questions about the Java API and the relevant precedents. Among other things, he asked the parties to weigh in on the implications of this week's EU court decision that allowing functional characteristics of programming languages to be copyrighted would "monopolize" ideas.
Some of Judge Alsup's comments in the courtroom in recent days suggested that he is skeptical of Oracle's position.
"If someone were to give you an assignment and say, 'Go write a guide book on how to drive from San Francisco to Monterey,' and everybody could sit down and write their own two-page thing on that, there would be some similarities. But the idea is not protected," Alsup said in court last Friday.
"Implementations are not derivative works. They are independent works, that simply start with the idea of the specification," he argued. "When somebody looks at a specification, and says, this is the input, and these are the outputs... programmers each use their own creativity" to implement it. This line of argument may lead Alsup to conclude that the "sequence, structure, and organization" of APIs are not copyrightable.
Indeed, some of the questions Alsup raised in his Thursday memo pressed further on this point. "Is the input-output (i.e., argument and return) scheme of a method copyrightable?" he asked. "For example, can someone copyright the function of inputting an angle and outputting the cosine of that angle? If someone has a copyright on a particular program to find cosines, does that copyright cover all other implementations that perform the identical function (input = angle, output = cosine)?"
Alsup also asked about the significance of a precedent that Oracle has cited repeatedly. The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit—whose rulings Judge Alsup is not necessarily bound to follow—found that some aspects of a dental taxonomy are eligible for copyright protection. Alsup asked the parties to weigh in on whether the Seventh Circuit's reasoning has been endorsed by Alsup's own Ninth Circuit Court. And he probed whether the reasoning of that case applies to the "structure, sequence, and organization" of the Java APIs.
Finally, Alsup probed the argument that cloning the Java APIs was necessary to achieving compatibility between Java and the Android APIs. Java and Android are not designed to directly interoperate. "What exactly are the parties referring to?" he asked. "Is it 'compatibility' with programmers who write in the Java programming language? Or compatibility with pre-existing programs? If so, approximately what percent of pre-existing programs written for the Java platform are compatible with Android? Is it compatibility with the TCK? Or Java virtual machine? Or java compiler?"
The judge gave Google and Oracle a week to submit responses.
Update: The jury has gone home for the night, but it may be at a standstill even when it returns. Late in the day, the jury sent the judge a question: "What happens if we can't reach a unanimous decision and people are not budging?" Judge Alsup encouraged the jury to try to reach a consensus on as many points as possible. He suggested that if the jury was not able to reach a verdict on all of the copyright issues, the court would continue with the patent phase of the trial. The jury will continue its deliberations tomorrow.
Joe Mullin, on location at the courthouse, contributed reporting for this story.
Listing image by Photograph by Romain Guy
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