The Supreme Court Considers Google Street View

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Google Street View carAll of the interest in the Supreme Court tomorrow is likely to be focused on Hobby Lobby and, to a lesser extent, Harris v. Quinn. But I’ll be watching something that happens before either of those decisions is announced. I’ll be looking to see if the Supreme Court granted cert in the StreetView case. I hope the answer is no.

The StreetView case — Google v. Joffe — is one that I’ve blogged extensively about over the past year. See Part I, Part II; see also my coverage of the Ninth Circuit opinion, Google’s petition for rehearing, and the filing of Google’s cert. petition.) Briefly, Google’s StreetView cars intercepted the contents of transmissions from residential wi-fi routers whose owners had not turned on encryption. A number of class actions have been filed claiming that the interceptions were violations of the federal Wiretap Act. Google moved to dismiss them, arguing that radio communications (like wi-fi) basically have to be encrypted to be protected by the Wiretap Act. The district court and the Ninth Circuit disagreed, holding that the exception Google points to applies only to traditional AM/FM radio broadcasts.

Although I disagree with the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning and would find it professionally advantageous if the Supreme Court decided to take the case, I hope it denies cert. Here’s why. Continue reading →

Is Hachette Being Hoisted by Its Own DRM Petard?

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oldbooks2.JPGRebecca Tushnet points to this column by Cory Doctorow arguing that Hachette is being held hostage in its fight with Amazon over e-book versions of its books because of its “single-minded insistence on DRM”: “It’s likely that every Hachette ebook ever sold has been locked with some company’s proprietary DRM, and therein lies the rub.” Doctorow argues that because of the DMCA Hachette can no longer get access, or authorize others to get access to, its own books:

Under US law (the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and its global counterparts (such as the EUCD), only the company that put the DRM on a copyrighted work can remove it. Although you can learn how to remove Amazon’s DRM with literally a single, three-word search, it is nevertheless illegal to do so, unless you’re Amazon. So while it’s technical child’s play to release a Hachette app that converts your Kindle library to work with Apple’s Ibooks or Google’s Play Store, such a move is illegal.

It is an own-goal masterstroke.

Everyone loves irony, but I can’t figure out how to make Doctorow’s argument work. First, I can’t figure out what the anticircumvention problem would be. Second, I can’t figure out why Hachette wouldn’t be able to provide other distributors with e-book versions of its books. Continue reading →

Oracle v. Google Reversed – Why Framing Matters

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Two years to the day since my last blog post on this subject, the Federal Circuit has reversed Judge Alsup’s ruling that the Java API (the list of function and variable -a/k/a parameter- names) is uncopyrightable. The Federal Circuit held that the structure, sequence, and organization of the APIs renders them sufficiently original and non-functional to be copyrightable. As such, the case is remanded to determine whether there is fair use by Google in using them wholesale to make Android. For more background, see my prior post.

The problem with this ruling is twofold. First, it is surely correct. Second, it is surely wrong. Why is it correct? Because structure, sequence, and organization can be creative. This has long been true, and well should be. I won’t relitigate that here, but holding that these APIs were simply not copyrightable was a stretch in the 9th Circuit, and the Federal Circuit is correct to say so.

Why is it wrong? Because Google should surely be privileged to do what it did without having to resort to fair use. The court says: “We disagree with Google’s suggestion that Sony and Sega created an ‘interoperability exception’ to copyrightability.”

It is here that framing is important. The court’s statement is accurate; we don’t get rid of copyrightability just to allow interoperability. But Sega is crystal clear that we do allow interoperability reuse: “To the extent that a work is functional or factual, it may be copied,Baker v. Selden, as may those expressive elements of the work that ‘must necessarily be used as incident to’ expression of the underlying ideas, functional concepts, or facts….” This is not the merger doctrine that the court applied, but rather a defense to infringement.

In short, this should have been an abstraction-filtration-comparison case, and the Federal Circuit makes clear that Judge Alsup did not perform that analysis. The appeals court also makes clear that if the APIs are directly taken, you can jump directly to filtration, but this does not mean you need to hold the APIs uncopyrightable in order to filter them out in the infringement analysis. Instead, Oracle gets its copyright, and Google gets interoperability. It is here that the appellate decision misses the boat.

I hate to be critical after the fact, but this case should never have gone to the jury. It should have been decided as a non-infringement summary judgment case pre-trial where Oracle kept its copyright but infringement was denied as a matter of law due to functional reuse. Maybe that would have been reversed, too, but at least the framing would have been right to better support affirmance.

May 12, 2014 update: Two commenters have gone opposite ways on Sega, so I thought I would expand that discussion a bit:

Sega is about intermediate copying fair use, yes. But that intermediate copying was to get to the underlying interoperability. And I quote the key sentence from Sega above – even if that functionality is bound up with expression (as it is in this case), we still consider that a privileged use (and thus a worthy end to intermediate copying, which is not a privileged use).

Now, in this case, we don’t need to get to the intermediate copying part because the interoperability information was published. But the privileged use that allowed the intermediate copying didn’t suddenly go away simply because Google didn’t have to reverse engineer to expose it. So, so say Sega doesn’t apply because it is a fair use case completely misunderstands Sega. The fair use there was not about fair use of the APIs. That use was allowed with a simple hand wave. The fair use was about copying the whole program to get to those APIs, something that is not relevant here. So sending this case back for a fair use determination is odd.

That said, Sega pretty clearly makes the use a defense to infringement, rather than a 102(b) ruling that there can be no copyright.

The Supreme Court heard Alice v. CLS Bank – in 1976

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As patent system followers eagerly await the outcome of Alice v. CLS Bank, it occurred to me that the Court has already heard this exact case – back in the 1970s. My prior discussion of Alice is here as background.

In Dann v. Johnston, the applicant sought a patent on software that allowed banks to report account spending by category (e.g. rent, utilities) rather than having customers calculate this themselves. This patent is little different than the patent in Alice in concept. The Alice patent covers software that allows banks to reconcile transactions through the use of “shadow” accounts kept in data records.

The Court took the case up on two questions: subject matter and obviousness. In the end, the Court dodged the subject matter question, but instead ruled that the patent was obvious, in large part because it simply implemented something that already existed in paper:

Under respondent’s system, what might previously have been separate accounts are treated as a single account, and the customer can see on a single statement the status and progress of each of his “sub-accounts.” Respondent’s “category code” scheme, see supra, at 221, is, we think, closely analogous to a bank’s offering its customers multiple accounts from which to choose for making a deposit or writing a check. Indeed, as noted by the Board, the addition of a category number, varying with the nature of the transaction, to the end of a bank customer’s regular account number, creates “in effect, a series of different and distinct account numbers. . . .” Pet. for Cert. 34A. Moreover, we note that banks have long segregated debits attributable to service charges within any given separate account and have rendered their customers subtotals for those charges.

The utilization of automatic data processing equipment in the traditional separate account system is, of course, somewhat different from the system encompassed by respondent’s invention. As the CCPA noted, respondent’s invention does something other than “provide a customer with . . . a summary sheet consisting of net totals of plural separate accounts which a customer may have at a bank.” 502 F. 2d, at 771. However, it must be remembered that the “obviousness” test of § 103 is not one which turns on whether an invention is equivalent to some element in the prior art but rather whether the difference between the prior art and the subject matter in question “is a difference sufficient to render the claimed subject matter unobvious to one skilled in the applicable art. . . .” Id., at 772 (Markey, C. J., dissenting).

You could cut something like this out and plop it right into the Alice opinion. Except now, obviousness is not on the table. The question is whether the Court got it wrong by not ruling on subject matter in 1976. I don’t think so, but I do think that Dann v. Johnston is the most underused Supreme Court opinion in the software area.

Are You Missing the Market, Aspen?

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Professors are in an uproar over Aspen Publisher’s new rules for textbooks. In short, if you thought you could buy a book and do what you wanted after that (i.e. sell it used), Aspen wants to change that system. Instead of a true, unbundled digital option, it has a system where students buy both a physical textbook and a “lifetime” digital book. Too bad as there is a market opportunity that they might be missing. On the legal doctrine front, Josh Blackman called it out. James Grimmelmann jumped on the bashing. Rebecca Tushnet has poked at the offer too. But where is the market here? Is there a way Aspen could make this shift work well? If so, would authors (i.e., professors with deals with Aspen) like it? And why not use dollars to tell Aspen what to do? Assign a different casebook from a competitor (FYI there is a free one out there, see below). There are some specific issues that illustrate sme of the problems in this space.

First, what about time and artificial editions? Rebecca nails this point by calling out that some areas of law (e.g., IP) change so fast that new editions and coverage issues make staying up with casebooks a problem. In those areas, does first sale do much work? Maybe it does much work in the few years between editions. But after that, the text is somewhat obsolete. Dusting of an IP text in digital or hardcopy from the 1990s would be dangerous except for fundamentals (and maybe even for those). Still, there are now seven editions for the Dukeminier casebook. Are the updates every four or so years needed? Even in other areas, are authors updating to add value or to create a new text that undercuts the used market? Do publishers lean on authors to issue new editions when there is not much to say as a market window or version control? If so, the publisher is setting up the demand for secondary or alternate markets that cut out the publisher.

So is this system functioning? As I noted before, the OpenStax system offers high quality texts for free and in a modular way. That means sections are updated for free and folks can assemble material as they wish. Law does not have that yet. The folks at Semaphore Press are close however. That press happens to publish a property text by Steve Semeraro (disclosure I am friends with the folks at Semaphore and introduced them to Steve). It is not quite OpenStax, but it is an interesting model with a shareware feel.

Second, what about the cost to write and update a text? I know it takes tons of time. Whether RA’s do some work or it is all by the professors, the time to write a good casebook is real. I am grateful for the good books. A great teacher’s manual is also a huge help. For new teachers and even experienced, a rich manual provides insights about how the author(s) teach the material and where they see the comments to be headed. One can then choose to follow that lead or modify. But is the price point for texts (as many noted often close to $200) sustainable? Would the market collapse if the cost dropped to low or no charge? OpenStax indicates that the system could shift, and a small crowd of experts would be able to offer an excellent, up-to-date text. And as Pam Samuelson and many others have noted, scholarly works pay off in reputation. So having the most assigned text (or specific chapter on a subject) may stimulate just enough competition for reputation to get great texts (or chapters) but not a glut of roughly the same material from many high-priced publishers.

Third, what about that market opportunity? Would a publisher that offered A) a true digital copy for $40, $50, or even a $100 take share from others? B) What if the publisher said rent the hard copy for a reduced price (again it should be low)? Some might hate that idea as a matter of doctrine but that market is emerging on Amazon and at least lets the student know what is going on (though I think a rental model poses some issues for libraries in that no one should say that libraries should just be rental depots that is another debate for another time).

So Apsen, if you’d like to survive I am betting your authors would like that too. But I am also betting they want to work with you to offer much better solutions than the ones you have right now. The life time digital edition and the high price insult the authors and the marketplace. I think others will find ways to route around you. But you could take your current position and parlay it for the future. If not, I think you may have pushed the law text market to Semaphore or OpenStax. Hmm, maybe Aspen should stay with its model after all.