Justice Breyer's Warning
Our hosts start today’s episode by diving into the Supreme Court’s 6-2 opinion in Google v. Oracle, a multibillion dollar copyright case involving whether Google unlawfully used Oracle’s programming code when the tech titan created its Android operating system. Also on today’s podcast, Sarah and David chat about Justice Stephen Breyer’s Scalia Lecture, misdemeanor prosecutions, a new study on religious liberty’s winning streak on the Roberts Court, and a Native American adoption law case.
Show Notes:
-Justice Breyer’s Scalia lecture.
-Misdemeanor prosecution explainer by Alex Tabarrok and “16 theories for why crime plummeted in the US” by Dara Lind and German Lopez in Vox.
-“An Extraordinary Winning Streak for Religion at the Supreme Court” by Adam Liptak in the New York Times and “The Roberts Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Protections for Religion: A Statistical Portrait” by Lee Epstein and Eric A. Posner in the Supreme Court Review.
-Native American adoption law case.
-Take the next 30-days to try a Dispatch membership
I dispute that what Google copied was "code."
Let's say I make a Virtual Reality platform. I have to write code to handle things like "Look Up" and "Left Hand Grab" so I write algorithms (aka functions or methods) to handle each of these tasks. I name these algorithms "LookUp" and "LeftHandGrab." This is my API. Each of these algorithms contains more than 2,000 lines of code representing days, weeks, or months of development and testing each. Now developers that license my product can create VR applications and games by telling my engine to run these algorithms (aka call these methods) in interesting ways without needing to be experts in how VR engines work under the hood.
A competitor comes along with their own VR application, and in an effort to ease people switching from my product, they copy those names "LookUp" and "LeftHandGrab" and all the other algorithm names in my API to their API. All the code inside these algorithms is their own, just the names are copied.
There's a little more complexity to APIs than this, but I don't think it affects the outcome. (The deeper definition of an API is that if you run an algorithm by name with parameters of specific types, the program promises to return a certain type of output or specific types of error messages)
Google still did the effort to re-implement the actual algorithms or use properly licensed (or free) code.
Did car makers ever have to license the steering wheel (just the big circle part) and the fact that spinning it counter-clockwise makes the wheels turn left, or which pedal is which, or what order the gears are in, from their original creators?
You guys have to change the music back. You can’t get me all fired up about Justice Breyer out there doing the lord’s work, and then end it with a song recorded during a recent walk through a Massage Envy.