On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Neil Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > On 21 Oct 2014, at 18:26, Robinson Tryon <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don't get the point of discussing the linguistic intricacies at the > same time as discussing the legal points without pointing out up-front > that the word choice is likely to be viewed as inflammatory. > > > My recollection was that thufir did point out at the very beginning that > s/he was using the words of the judgment, rather than his/her own choice of > words:
I think part of the problem here is that we're not talking about a multi-word quote, encased in quotation marks each time; we're talking about a single verb "to steal," conjugated in multiple forms, and used in several emails in a lengthy thread. > "It's remarkable that the trial judge and the appeal judge use > a word like stolen, and not "infringe" or other legal mumbo jumbo." Here's that sentence with some more context: --- ' Though the trial court did add the caveat that it “does not hold that the structure, sequence and organization of all computer programs may be stolen,”...' I cannot fathom why the FSF is on the side of letting API's get copied, I mean stolen. Do they not see the result this would have on the GPL? Or, do they see a larger issue? Or, do they just think that it's not stealing? It's remarkable that the trial judge and the appeal judge use a word like stolen, and not "infringe" or other legal mumbo jumbo. --- The entire premise of the paragraph hinged on the verb, not on the underlying question of whether the law was broken. You want to discuss language choice in a ruling? Let's go ahead, but I find it confusing to use the word choice of the judge when forming a statement like "I cannot fathom why the FSF is on the side of letting API's get copied, I mean stolen". Also in a follow-up email: "The FSF is ok with, in the words of not just the appeals court, but the original trial judge, stealing the SSO of a computer program?" Technically speaking, my understanding is that the FSF is in favor of weak restrictions on API reuse that are *akin* to what the courts *may have* meant when they used the word "stolen," but to #DEFINE the words 'stolen/stealing' for the purposes of this thread seems unnecessarily complicated and potentially misleading when it's unclear whether or not what happened in this case was ever classified as 'stealing'. Much simpler is to just use two separate questions: 1) Does the FSF believe that the SSO of a computer program should have no restrictions on its use? As Luke mentioned, the FSF would likely be in favor of unrestricted use of "function names, arguments, semantics, [and] error codes". 2) What did the trial judge and appeals court mean by the word "stolen"? Was there any clarity on what types of use of SSO could be classified as "stealing" ? (good question; not sure I've read enough of the rulings to answer it :-) Best, --R -- Robinson Tryon QA Engineer - The Document Foundation LibreOffice Community Outreach Herald [email protected]
