On Wednesday 24 October 2001 02:49 am, Michael Beck wrote:
> If you go to Altai v. CA (1992), "the Second Circuit designed its Altai > test to deal with the fact that computer programs, copyrighted as "literary > works," can be infringed by what is known as "nonliteral" copying, which > is copying that is paraphrased or loosely paraphrased rather than word for > word. [...] When faced with nonliteral-copying cases, courts must determine > whether similarities are due merely to the fact that the two works share > the same underlying idea or whether they instead indicate that the second > author copied the first author's expression. The Second Circuit designed > its Altai test to deal with this situation in the computer context, > specifically with whether one computer program copied nonliteral expression > from another program's code." The key phrase above is "copying that is paraphrased or loosely paraphrased". In some rare instances, a subclass could be considered a "paraphrase" of the base class. But this is not the normal and typical use of inheritance. There would be no use at all for inheritance if it were only a restatement of the base class. Why use the subclass at all then? The most common reason for using inheritance is to (in literary terms) "expand upon a theme." I don't see how the Altai test applies to subclasses. -- David Johnson ___________________ http://www.usermode.org pgp public key on website -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
