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From the dissent:

"Instead of creating its own declaring code—as Apple and Microsoft chose to do— Google copied verbatim 11,500 lines of Oracle’s declaring code and arranged that code exactly as Oracle had done."

I didn't read the whole opinion, but what is Google's excuse for this? If there's one way to do it, I don't think copyright should apply. But when there's more than one way, why should copyright not provide some protection? I guess just because it's tiny and contains little expression?

Regardless, it seems like very poor judgement to not do a cleanroom implementation here.




The 11,500 lines is the API interface, so just the function/class signatures.

They _did_ do a cleanroom implementation, that's the whole issue that makes it an interesting case: are APIs fair use?


Why did it have to be a verbatim copy rather than just a very similar API spec?


Because you wouldn’t be able to run your existing Java code on their VM?

The whole point was interoperability


That’s the API? You can’t clean room that without having a different API.




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