How Not to Get Snookered by Claims of “Proof” of Copyright Infringement

“I guess you heard that Florian Mueller is at it again. He made
strong claims of a smoking gun regarding alleged copyright
infringement of Oracle files by Google. Well, in the cold light of
day, some of the media who printed it without fact checking are now
awakening to the news that the news wasn’t as reliable or
unchallengeable as they assumed.

“You’ll find corrections now, notably from Ed Burnette at ZDNet,
who is a programmer-journalist, and by Paul Ryan at ars technica.
That is what journalists are supposed to do, if they see wrong
information. It’s part of the ethics of being a good journalist,
and the other part is to issue corrections when the mistake is your
own. To their credit, many journalists have now corrected what they
wrote initially.

“However some continue to print that that it still means
something horrible about Google and the predictions of Google’s
doom are still in the air. And of course, Florian never quits, so
he promises more.”

Complete
Story