Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Regular readers of this blog may remember that I have on earlier occasion covered the very slow march through the court system of a monster of an intellectual property case, the dispute over the legality of Google's use of Java interfaces in its Android coding. But to review: years ago Oracle bought Sun, the company whose engineers had created the Java programming language, on which various APIs (application programming interfaces) have in turn been built.  The dispute is a matter of copyright, not of patents. And early on in this litigation, Google took the position that there is no copyrightable interest in APIs. The Federal Circuit held against that view, and remanded to the trial courts for consideration of whether Google use is "fair use" under copyright doctrine, or unfair and thus infringing use. The Supreme Court, in 2015, declined to hear an appeal from the Federal Circuit, so Google resigned itself to fighting that battle in the trenches of a trial.  The jury ...

On April 3, plaintiffs withdrew a lawsuit against Google in a federal court in northern California, a lawsuit in which they had contended that Google was illegally tying its licensing of the Android operating system to the favorable treatment of Google apps.  They didn't withdraw their complaint because they had a change of heart. They did so because an earlier ruling by this court had pulled their ladder out from under them. It was jump to the ground or take a nasty fall. Here's a link to a news story on the subject. What is striking about this lawsuit is how much it resembles similar lawsuits brought against Microsoft back when it was the great digital boogeyman. Then, too, the central argument was a tying theory. [Sometimes that is written "tie-in." Fortunately, the two phrases sound the same, so when people speak to one another about these matters, there's no real chance for confusion. One creates a tie-in by tying one product or service to another, ...