In Oracle America v. Google, what was the District Court jury&#39;s rationale behind its &quot;fair use&quot; finding? In the case of Oracle America v. Google, the District Court of Northern California ruled on whether or not Google's reimplementation of 37 Java APIs constituted fair use. My question is, how - in the said jury's opinion - is Google's action "fair use"?
Here are the jury instructions. These describe how to evaluate witness testimony, burdens of proof, and the four-factor fair use test, among other things. The jury had to answer yes or no to the following question: Has Google shown by a preponderance of the evidence that its use in Android of the declaring lines of code and their structure, sequence, and organization from Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4 and Java 2 Standard Edition Version 5.0 constitutes a "fair use" under the Copyright Act? They answered yes. Juries do not explain their reasoning (different jurors might even have different reasonings), but the assumption is that they followed the jury instructions to arrive at this conclusion. To be clear, the issue wasn't reimplementation of 37 Java APIs, but a more limited taking, including "the declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization".
No, it does not fall under fair use: It is commercial use in nature It is a copyrighted work It is hard to say what portion of the copyrighted work you'd be using based on your description, so test three is inconclusive It could be argued in your favor that the infringement would not have an impact on their potential market, but it could potentially impact the value If discovered the owner of the copyright could pursue action against the company you work for.
It does mean that you cannot reuse any parts of the source code, even small simple ones. You would have to rebuild the code from scratch. There is a significant chance that the code would be "substantially similar" to the code that you were hired to build, also that if anybody else were to write a bubble sort or 24-to-am/pm conversion routine, it would look the same, where even variable names (which should describe function) are the same or very similar. In case of an infringement lawsuit, you would have to defend yourself by showing that there are only a few ways to code a given function. Copyright protects only the "expression", not the abstract idea. A linked list is an idea, which can't be protected by copyright; same with recursion, pointers, stacks, object-oriented programming... Anything that involves copy and paste is infringement. If you re-read the copyrighted code and then try to reconstruct it, you probably crossed the infringement line. If you remember the problems and solutions and accidentally write somewhat similar code, that is probably on the safe side. From the perspective of the programmer not wanting to always reinvent the wheel, it would be most useful to make a distinction in the contract between "the essentials of the customer's program" versus "incidental utility work". The difficulty will arise in saying specifically what is essential vs. incidental. For instance, I know that if I were to hire you to develop a speech-recognition system, low-level audio-acquisition and encoding would not be essential to my purpose, whereas DSP parsing routines would be the center of my interest. The programmer would then want to retain recycling rights to all non-essential code.
You should probably get a lawyer, but my reading is this: The company whose SDK you use owns their SDK, owns their code, and is free to take any of your ideas how to improve their code without paying you. But they say that ideas are ten a penny, so this is mostly there to prevent pointless lawsuits. On the other hand, it says that everything you do with your product is yours. I might be completely wrong, that's why you should get a lawyer.
Q1 and Q2 are definitely not copyright violations. Copyright protects original expression. Your questions are yours; the only things you are using are the names, and copyright doesn't cover them on their own. The quotation in Q3 might conceivably come under copyright. However in practice it is very likely to be fair use (unfortunately nothing is definitely fair use until a court rules on it, but I can't imagine a short quotation in a quiz being an issue).
I'm not aware of case law on point, other than Riley, which you mention (which doesn't mean that there isn't any - I'm not a specialist in this area). But, I think that the answer would be that you do have an expectation of privacy because the Riley holding that there was an expectation of privacy in a smart phone didn't really hinge in any meaningful way on the existence of a password. The linked summary of the Riley decision explains the court's reasoning as follows: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. wrote the opinion for the unanimous Court. The Court held that the warrantless search exception following an arrest exists for the purposes of protecting officer safety and preserving evidence, neither of which is at issue in the search of digital data. The digital data cannot be used as a weapon to harm an arresting officer, and police officers have the ability to preserve evidence while awaiting a warrant by disconnecting the phone from the network and placing the phone in a "Faraday bag." The Court characterized cell phones as minicomputers filled with massive amounts of private information, which distinguished them from the traditional items that can be seized from an arrestee's person, such as a wallet. The Court also held that information accessible via the phone but stored using "cloud computing" is not even "on the arrestee's person." Nonetheless, the Court held that some warrantless searches of cell phones might be permitted in an emergency: when the government's interests are so compelling that a search would be reasonable. Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. wrote an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment in which he expressed doubt that the warrantless search exception following an arrest exists for the sole or primary purposes of protecting officer safety and preserving evidence. In light of the privacy interests at stake, however, he agreed that the majority's conclusion was the best solution. Justice Alito also suggested that the legislature enact laws that draw reasonable distinctions regarding when and what information within a phone can be reasonably searched following an arrest. The 4th Amendment expressly protects "papers" in your possession, which can't be password protected, and a smart phone file is analogous to a "paper" for 4th Amendment purposes. Your expectation of privacy in an unlocked smart phone flows from your exclusive possession of the phone as a piece of tangible personal property containing information, and not just from the password protection. In the same vein, I don't think that you would need to have a lock on a diary to have an expectation of privacy in it. This said, this is a cutting edge area of the law and password protection for a smart phone provides both more practical protection and potentially a less ambiguous cases of legal protection from search (since it brings you closer to the facts of Riley), and is therefore still a good idea.
From Baker, Donald I. "To Indict or Not to Indict: Prosecutorial Discretion in Sherman Act Enforcement." Cornell L. Rev. 63 (1977): 405: The Assistant Attorney General must ultimately decide whether to bring a criminal prosecution. He bases that choice in part upon articulated principles, in part upon intuition gained from experience, and ultimately upon the facts of the particular case. The choice to prosecute Microsoft and not Google, Apple, or Mozilla for (what you claim to be) ostensibly similar activities is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. My guess is that the Attorney General's office simply does not believe the actions of the other companies rise to the level of an antitrust violation. When they believe they do, they prosecute. (United States of America v. Apple Inc., et al., 12 Civ. 2862 (DLC)). Microsoft settled their case. No other party is responsible for Microsoft's decision to settle, even if they were doing the same thing, and even if they are later found to be guilty for or come to a settlement agreement regarding the same thing.
In the United States, the case law on framing as copyright infringement is fairly scarce and somewhat conflicting. Consider first the 2007 Ninth Circuit Appeals ruling in Perfect 10 vs. Amazon.com. Google included framed images on their site. Google did not have the right to display these image works, but the ruling says ultimately that they did not display the works (emphasis mine): Instead of communicating a copy of the image, Google provides HTML instructions that direct a user’s browser to a website publisher’s computer that stores the full-size photographic image. Providing these HTML instructions is not equivalent to showing a copy. First, the HTML instructions are lines of text, not a photographic image. Second, HTML instructions do not themselves cause infringing images to appear on the user’s computer screen. The HTML merely gives the address of the image to the user’s browser. The browser then interacts with the computer that stores the infringing image. It is this interaction that causes an infringing image to appear on the user’s computer screen. Perfect 10 argues that Google displays a copy of the fullsize images by framing the full-size images, which gives the impression that Google is showing the image within a single Google webpage. While in-line linking and framing may cause some computer users to believe they are viewing a single Google webpage, the Copyright Act, unlike the Trademark Act, does not protect a copyright holder against acts that cause consumer confusion. Note that this second paragraph highlights that iframe linking may not be a copyright violation, but it may be illegal for other reasons, e.g., trademark violation, by confusing the origin of the framed content. This ruling appears to be in contradiction to the 1998 district court case Futuredontics Inc. v. Applied Anagramic Inc., which found that framing creates a derivative work. The most striking difference from the Perfect 10 case is in the following passage (emphasis mine): Defendants primarily rely on Louis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. [...]. In that case, the Ninth Circuit held that a Game Genie which merely enhances audiovisual displays which originate in Nintendo game cartridges does not constitute a derivative work because... it does "not incorporate a portion of a copyrighted work in some concrete or permanent form." Id. at 968 (emphasis added). The Court also noted that the Game Genie could not duplicate or recast a Nintendo game's output. Galoob did distinguish Mirage and noted that the Mirage decision would have been different had the plaintiff "distributed lenses that merely [*10] enabled users to view several art works simultaneously." Id. Nevertheless, Galoob... is distinguishable from the instant case. Galoob does not foreclose Plaintiff from establishing that AAI's web page, incorporates Futuredontic's web page in some "concrete or permanent form" or that AAI's framed link duplicates or recasts Plaintiff's web page. There appears to be a fundamental disagreement between these two cases over whether a webpage that includes a link actually "displays" the linked work. The Perfect 10 ruling viewed the page as HTML instructions that were only related to linked works insofar as those instructions could cause a user's browser to render framed content from a copyright holder different from the author of the HTML page. By contrast, the Futuredonics case considered the intended rendered output of a browser as a derivative work that includes the framed page in a "concrete or permanent form" and that "duplicates" the framed page. I'm not sure how to reconcile these two cases. Perfect 10 is more recent and from a higher court, but I'm insufficiently skilled in law to determine if and how that counts for anything. It's also possible that facts of the two cases are sufficiently different that the different rulings could be reconciled and both remain true simultaneously. Now that we've considered the case law, if you will indulge me in a moment of armchair speculation, let us consider an interesting hypothetical. Suppose I am the owner of apsillers.com. I host an HTML page on my site at http://apsillers.com/my_favorite_stories.html. My my_favorite_stories.html page frames a public domain resource at http://example.com/PD_Story.html. (I am not the owner of example.com.) Surely, we can agree that this is not copyright infringement. At a later time, the owner of example.com changes the text at http://example.com/PD_Story.htmlto include copyrighted content whose use by me would constitute infringement. My my_favorite_stories.html page remain totally unaltered. Does my_favorite_stories.html now violate copyright? The Perfect 10 ruling says no, because my_favorite_stories.html is only instructions. The Futuredontics ruling would appear to say yes, because it considers the final rendered output of the HTML, which now suddenly includes infringing content. It seems powerfully counterintuitive that the infringing status of my written work (my_favorite_stories.html) should change, dependent on the copyright status of a linked resource, when the content of my written work has remained totally unaltered. Perhaps you might argue that my case is different because I did not intend at the time I wrote my HTML page to infringe copyright. However, intent is irrelevant in making the initial yes/no determination of infringement (but may grant me a lesser punishment, as it would be innocent infringement.)