On Mar 29, 2005, at 11:30 AM, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
The almanac, news broadcast, and encyclopedia all contain a substantial amount of creativity in the selection and presentation of those facts. That's why they are copyrightable. You are free to lift the facts out of any of those --- the facts themselves are not, and can not be protected under the copyright act. So, you are free to do whatever you like with the sunrise and sunset times in your almanac, or the birth and death dates of Thomas Jefferson in your encyclopedia, or the latest developments in the Schivo case given on the news report.
So the issue is not whether facts can be copyrighted, but whether a .info file is a mere collection of facts. Some parts, yes, are facts: the name of the package, its dependencies, its home page. Others parts are not: the DescPort, for instance, or PatchScript. For this reason, one cannot say that the entire work is exempt from copyright law. In other words, I don't think a judge would accept an argument that goes, "Yes, I knew that parts of the work may have been covered by copyright law, but these other parts here, they are clearly factual. That means the whole thing is in the public domain."
I think a much similar case to a Fink info file is a telephone book, which can not be copyrighted (see the Supreme Court's decision in Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.[0]).
I've created several .info files, and they are quite unlike a simple directory listing. There is a lot of originality that goes into deciding how the file gets packaged, how to work around autoconf quirks, what do to do when a Java package has no build script whatsoever, and so on. They are not simply collections of facts.
Up through here, we have nothing creative at all: Everything is a fact, presented in a form mandated by Fink (the software) and Fink policy; if you took the raw facts out of this, gave them to a different person, and he created a new info file, he'd wind up with the same thing.
In my experience, this is just not true. I recently collaborated with a Fink developer on a .info for which we had both already written .info files, separately, and wanted to combine our efforts. As it turned out, our .info files were quite different. He had created the SplitOffs and SSL handling in a way I never would have thought of, and I had added configure parameters that fixed bugs he was not able to resolve. Thus, our .info files were expressions of the unique decisions we made in how to compile the package. These decisions were not "raw facts".
Now, it is true that two people working independently on a .info for the same package may very well end up with similar-looking .info files. By the same token, two programmers implementing a quicksort algorithm may end up with very similar code. But does this mean none of these works is protected by copyright law?
DescDetail: << bzip2 is a portable, lossless data compressor based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform. It achieves good compression and runs on practically every (32/64-bit) platform in the known universe. << DescPort: << Doesn't use autoconf, but comes with a useful Makefile. Anyway, the patch modifies it to build a shared library instead of a static one. <<
This is the only part that could, I think, even concievably be copyrighted. However, I very much doubt it; it is a list of facts with very little creativity in them.
Now hold on here... Does a metric of sufficient creativity truly exist? That is to say, "very little creativity" or "a lot of creativity" are so subjective, I don't see how they could be factors in deciding whether something is copyrightable. If "sufficiently creative" is indeed the guideline, then surely cover songs are no longer copyrightable. How much creativity could there be in copying another artist's rhythm, melody, style -- and even lyrics -- verbatim? And yet, covers certainly are protected by copyright law.
Not only that, its fairly short.
Again, I just don't buy the argument that length is a criterion in determining whether something is copyrightable. For example, here is a haiku I just wrote:
Yesterday I went to the store and bought a glass of milk and drank it.
Is this poem copyrightable? By your definition, no. It is very short. It is also factual. I did in fact buy milk at the store yesterday. (Okay, it was chocolate milk, but still...) Someone who went to the store yesterday and bought a glass of milk might come up with the exact same poem. Does that mean I am not allowed to declare copyright on the above work? IANAL, but I'm pretty sure the law says that the above haiku is Copyright (c) 2005 Trevor Harmon.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that this issue of .info copyrights is not as cut-and-dry as you make it out to be. I also fear that if we trivialize these licensing issues or make exceptions too easily, then others might feel free to do the same thing with the licensing of Fink itself.
Trevor
------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
