On Thu, 31 May 2007 20:19:17 -0500 rjack <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Run your C++ compiler code through the > “abstraction-filtration-comparison” test in the hands of an expert > witness in court and your source modules look like Swiss cheese with > VERY large holes. If the programmer’s comments have been stripped > (very likely) and trivial obfuscation steps have been applied, your > copyright protection is virtually non-existent.
If you strip out all the distinguishing characteristics, it's pretty obvious that on the remainder you cannot get copyright protection. If you strip the distinguishing stuff out of the typical novel, the result is no longer copyrightable either (e.g. Woody Allen's appreciation of War and Peace: "It's about Russians", or a reduction of Romeo and Juliet to "Boy meets girl, they fall in love, families don't want them to marry", etc). If you reduce the number of notes you look at to three or four, every piece of music is a copy of every other piece of music. It's obvious that you cannot claim copyright protection on fragments of code that anyone would write substantially the same because these fragments are determined in their expression by the hardware or other external influences. But only an idiot without knowledge about programming can argue that because a program performs the same well-defined function as another program (i.e. compiling 'C' code or performing an FTP transfer) its internal structures and algorithms have to be so similar as to be indistinguishable "after applying trivial obfuscation". Using your overly broad approach you could equally claim that love stories cannot be copyrighted, or that pictures of the Eiffel tower cannot be copyrighted because when you strip off all the distinguishing characteristics (framing, lighting, etc) they are pictures of the exact same object. But the reality is that every photograph is copyrighted, no matter how similar or trivial the subject. You're free to make your own picture of the scene, but you're not free to copy someone else's picture. The same applies to source code. What the Lexmark case is about is that similarity between those parts of the code that are so determined by the function to be performed cannot be used in court as proof of copyright infringement. Quite obviously it does not mean that you can lift sections out of the gcc source code and use them in your own compiler because "there is only one way in which a compiler can be written" and hence you can do with the gcc code as you please. -- Stefaan A Eeckels -- The one thing IT really needs to outsource is the freakin' clueless managers that don't understand that there are more possibilities than chaos on the one hand and the reduction of alternatives to zero on the other. -- Richard Hamilton in comp.sys.sun.hardware _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
