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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 3:05

SCOTUS Gives Google Victory Over Oracle

But I'm not really finding a lot of great journalism that's going into the details on what the implications of this decision are. I think we need to talk to a technical person to really kind of get those details. So what I like to do here is invite Suda to this conversation

Asking expert and former CTO of Skava @sudha about the decision and implications

@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 3:35
I think, in my opinion, based on everything that we know about how licenses and software has worked in the past, what Google did today was get away with highway robbery, and in that process opened up a Pandora's box for everyone else now. So what this means is that potentially I could create my own implementation of the Windows operating system, exposing the same APIs that Microsoft does for Windows and sell a cheaper OS
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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 2:58

Are apis just a gas pedal?

So yeah, while they might be using a Ford pedal and that pedal is telling the car to go, the real value is in the electric pieces that they put around it, all the software that they put in around it, the engine, the transmission, everything that they've built around that is really the value there. And I wanted to ask you, how accurate is that analogy to Google using these APIs to create the Android operating system? Is that a fair analogy?
@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 5:00
If you go to look at how the AP is defined in this lawsuit, it is a structure specification and organization. So they took your plans for a fighter jet and copied it to a Te and their own custom built components that fit those specifications. That's the issue at hand here. And what the Supreme Court verdict says is that the design, even though copyrightable is copying, it is fair use, which makes it extremely complicated in the world of tech on patents and Copyright infringement
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@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 0:49
Just to finish what I was saying. But the problem is even if it was just a portion of it, Copyright and patent laws were pretty well understood before today in that copying is copying. And if it was patented, then if your version imitated what was in the patent, then you're also violating patent law. And this is pretty, I would like to say not black and white, but pretty well defined
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@Phil
phil spade
@Phil · 1:46

Is piracy now legal?

But I also know that US technology companies have struggled when they've tried to sell their product overseas. The piracy laws in the United States are not the same in every country, and specifically with China. They are something that US technology companies have been struggling with for years, claiming that companies have pirated their software. So am I hearing you correctly in your responses that Chinese companies can completely copy can completely make a clone of anything from the US technology software
@sudha
Sudha Varadarajan
@sudha · 3:24
And the fact that the Supreme Court ruled that copy was fair use is basically saying that, yes, international funds can now copy your design without the knowhow of how to actually implement it. And the problem is that sometimes the brilliance is in the design, right. The implementation, once you know the nittygritties of the design, the specifications, the detail plans the implementation while time consuming
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