The argument that Google deserves punishment because they didn't buy another company is not one I'm even remotely sympathetic to.
The entire industry would be worse off today if our legal policy on APIs was, "they're copyrighted, but don't worry, you can just buy out companies you want to interop with." Imagine how much smaller and how much more uninteresting the tech world would be.
Any company that wasn't the size of Google couldn't have bought Sun, and any company, even companies smaller than Google, should be free to interop with the Java APIs the same way that Google did. Discussions about whether or not Google could have bought Sun are meaningless to me, I don't think they have anything of value to add to the current case, and I don't think they have anything to do with Oracle buying Sun with the sole intention of suing someone else.
You're replying to a thread where someone complains about Google excessively filing patents as a defensive/offensive measure, and your argument is that Google should also be excessively buying companies as a defensive measure against lawsuits?
This is also an argument that I'm not very sympathetic to -- the idea that we need to lock down an entire ecosystem and consolidate it into 3-4 giant 'stewards' to protect us from those giant stewards. Arguments about bullying aside, Google was honest regarding Java. They built a clean-room implementation. That was their only obligation. Sun saw it that way too.
It would have a major chilling effect on the industry if every company could decide who was allowed to interop with their products. The fact that a few extremely large, extremely powerful players could get around that chilling effect by literally owning everything makes that situation worse, not better.
Tiny players who get taken advantage of don't need the world you propose -- they need a way to safely, legally interoperate with the software around them. When Microsoft says that its Windows APIs are copyrighted, should the WINE team buy Microsoft so they have permission to get Windows software running on Linux? Should Oracle buy Amazon so it can compete in the cloud?[0]
> Oracle can't simultaneously argue that API-using code does not embody copyrighted material from an API, and yet API-using code embodies all copyrights in the API necessary to give Oracle the right to reimplement S3.
So, in your opinion, WINE is an illegal software product, and Microsoft should sue them into oblivion. And IBM should sue everybody else for copying the BIOS interface. And Amazon should sue Oracle for implementing the AWS APIs.
If you believe that Oracle deserves to win this case, those are requisite outcomes of the case, because Oracle's legal contention is that merely providing an independent implementation of the API is copyright infringement.
> Their first attack came in the form of lawyers using 9,000 IBM copyrights in the hope that Compaq had broken just one. Luckily for IBM, Compaq did break one copyright, which forced them into a corner. Compaq negotiated with IBM and ended up purchasing the copyright for $130 million. This, however, did not stop Compaq overall.
Google also did a clean room reverse engineering. Or at least clean enough that the jury voted to acquit Google of copying the Java source code, and Oracle has not appealed that claim--meaning Oracle concedes that at this point.
The only thing that Oracle claims Google has done at this point is copied the API, which anyone who wishes to do a clean room reverse engineering would also have to do. Oracle is trying to get a judgement that makes such clean room reverse engineering impossible, which is why everyone else is freaking out about this case and asking SCOTUS to reverse CAFC and Oracle here.
>With Google at the steering wheel I bet Java developers would still be enjoying Java 6.
Maybe. Maybe not. But just to be clear, if all this case was about was Oracle trying to extract some money from Google, it would be nothing but a curious sideshow.
What Oracle is doing goes way beyond Java. They are trying to set an insane precedent and that has never existed in our industry, and had it existed it would have drastically reshaped it to the extent that it would be unrecognizable today. The implications of Oracle winning would be far reaching and unknown.
If Google was so interested in Java, they could have made a bid to own Java.
Guess what, they would not have been sued and control its destiny.
With Google at the steering wheel I bet Java developers would still be enjoying Java 6.