Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this like a textbook description of clean-room reverse-engineering?
"One of our team members read the code, figured out which parts handled these fonts, and how it
decoded them. He wrote that down in his own words in a plain text document, not a program, following the prevailing court decisions about how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret."
“and how it decoded them. He wrote that down in his own words”
For clean-room design, you write down what the original does, not how it does it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design: “The term implies that the design team works in an environment that is "clean" or demonstrably uncontaminated by any knowledge of the proprietary techniques used by the competitor”)
Having said that, the distinction between “what” and “how” can be somewhat blurry and the article also says they were “following the prevailing court decisions about
how to avoid copyright issues while reverse-engineering a trade secret”, so maybe, it was more “what” than “how”.
That may have been true back then. But the courts are not applying the Altai test anymore. Had this happened today, Adobe could have sued and won based on a Whelan "structure, sequence, and organization" infringement -- the same terms under which Oracle is suing Google (and likely to win in SCOTUS).
The legal arguments around the oracle suit are pretty insane. If oracle prevails, it will be the end of interoperability as we know it, since unauthorized programatic / reproduction use of an API (and probably UI elements once the lower courts try to interpret the ruling) will become copyright infringement.
Hopefully congress will step in if that happens. I’m not holding my breath though; it would immediately cement monopoly positions for any company big enough to afford lobbyists.
Maybe the big tech backlash crowd will suddenly become legally/technically literate and save us?
The legal arguments are quite straightforward. Did Google copy Oracle's APIs? Yes, they did. Could they have chosen another form of expression of the ideas in those APIs and arrived at the same technical result? Yes, they could. Was Oracle harmed by this copying? Yes they were. Therefore, Google violated copyright.
A finding not in favor of Oracle would call into question whether U.S. copyright law has any force at all. While software nerds may well be okay with this, people in literally every other field of creative endeavor -- art, music, literature, media -- may lose their shirts. And the hardest hit won't be Lady Gaga or other millionaires, it'll be the small time players.
There is no morally sensible universe in which the Supreme Court does not find for Oracle.
Copyright is so far away from the original ideals, that I honestly say "fuck em". If 28 years is not enough to make your money from your creative works, then too bad.
