Hyman Rosen wrote: > > Rjack wrote: > > If you think the Copyright Office may re-define the definitions > > provided by Congress in the Copyright Act then you are either > > extremely naive or smoking something causing you to hallucinate. > > Given the choice of believing you or believing the manual of > procedures for the government agency responsible for copyrights, > I should think the choice is obvious. To be explicit: not you.
Here's a more balanced view: http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise26.html ----- VI.B. Source Code and Object Code Although copyright comes into being with the writing of the source code, it is the object code the actual instructions that control the computer when the program is being executed that copyright generally protects. In most instances, the source code is never revealed to the public, and thus remains protected as a trade secret even though millions and millions of copies of the program are distributed as object code. Every computer program copyright case treats the copyright in the source code and the object code as equivalent. That is likely because they were decided at a time when there was essentially a one-to-one correspondence between the source code and the object code. The source code was written in assembly language, with each line of the source code corresponding to a single machine instruction (or, if a macro facility existed as part of the assembler, a small predefined series of machine instructions). The source code contained information that made it easier for a programmer to write or understand the program mnemonics like ADD instead of a bit pattern of 01000011 for the addition instruction, the use of symbolic labels for storage or program locations, and the inclusion of comments to annotate the program which the assembly process removed or replaced as it produced the object code. With the advent of higher-level programming languages, that is less the case. The compiler for the higher-level language performs a much more complicated translation than was the case for an assembler. It not only produces complex series of object code instructions for each source line but may actually rearrange the statements of the program to produce a more efficient program. There is no longer the one-to-one correspondence between the source code and the object code. This, along with their size, makes it more difficult to reverse engineer (for example, to learn how the program works either by testing or by trying to convert the object code back to source code) a modern computer program, which in turn makes it more likely that any copying will be a literal copying of the entire program. Even though source code and object code are distinct, it is still useful to maintain the concept that the source code and the object code are just different forms of the same copyrighted work. The Copyright Office regards the source code and object code as equivalent for purposes of registration. In fact, it generally requires a deposit of at least a portion of the source code (generally the first and last 25 pages see their Circular 61) and questionsany registration that includes only object code. Where an applicant is unable or unwilling to deposit source code, he/she must state in writing that the work as deposited in object code contains copyrightable authorship. The Office will send a letter stating that registration has been made under its rule of doubt and warning that it has not determined the existence of copyrightable authorship. {FN102: Copyright Office Circular 61: Copyright Registration for Computer Programs, at 2} ----- I personally believe that even if a particular instance of object code is judged to include protected expression of both/either source code's copyright owner and/or compiler's copyright owner, the resulting binary is merely an aggregation of multiple computer program works -- in GNUspeak it is called "mere aggregation". Do you agree, Hyman? regards, alexander. P.S. Hey Hyman, consider: http://www.copyright.gov/reports/s-plan2008/s-plan2008-2013-1.pdf "Judiciary · Although the Office does not enforce the provisions of title 17, it may be involved in litigation in several ways. It can choose to intervene in a copyright infringement suit under section 411(a) in a case where registration has been refused. It may be sued under the Administrative Procedure Act. Or it may be asked to participate in litigation by (a) assisting the Department of Justice in preparing an amicus curiae brief in support of a particular position or in defending a particular action, or (b) by bringing a suit under section 407 to compel the deposit of a work." -- http://gng.z505.com/index.htm (GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards too, whereas GNU cannot.) _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
