Your views are founded in your knowledge of the law of the country you work in, while ours are based on news reports about seemingly nonsensical lawsuits filed in the US.
This is a media blitz that sells "crap" to the hoi polloi. The truth is that there are few cases filed that make no sense, and many cases filed that do make sense but are made to look strange by the media.
You can't convince us because we don't have the background knowledge to verify your arguments. For my part, I believe that there will always be at least one lawyer that represents the opposite of your views, if paid enough money. That's why it takes judges to make verdicts, right?
Judge only decide the law. Juries make verdicts. The idea that law is so flexible, like a debating class is not true. Only a few attorneys, and usually really good ones making a legitimate point, try to extend the law beyond its present boundaries. Judges are bound to use precedent, which means that such "original arguments" can only be changed ultimately in the appellate courts. All courts in the U.S., further, have clear rules which allow the courts to punish people who file dumb lawsuits, along with their lawyers.
www.groklaw.net should be a good starting point. I remember that one example of "stolen code" involves indentical comments that go back to a common code base from which both, the proprietary and the open source software, got the same code. Or something like that.
Thanks, again, for this. I see nothing startling or requiring a change in this sort of suit. That does not seem frivolous or related to the @author tags in a negative way to me.
