Not to put too fine a point on this, but it sounds like you are talking about boilerplate (and authored) template code that Bison incorporates in its output. It is also tricky because the Bison output is computer source code. That is an interesting case.
In the US, original work of authorship is pretty specific in the case of literary works, which is where software copyright falls the last time I checked (too long ago, though). I suspect that a license (in the contractual sense) can deal with more than copyright. And, if Bison spits out copyright notices, they still only apply to that part of the output, if any, that qualifies as copyrightable subject matter. Has the Bison claim ever been tested in court? Has anyone been pursued or challenged for infringement? I'm just curious. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Norbert Thiebaud [mailto:nthieb...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 22:11 To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org; dennis.hamil...@acm.org Subject: Re: A systematic approach to IP review? On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 7:55 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: > I'll stand by my original statement. > > I'm not going to get into the Pixar case since it doesn't apply here. I did not say it applied to the Visual studio generated cruft... I merely commented on the blanket assertion that 'computer generated => no copyright' > > The Bison manual may have license conditions on what can be done with the > generated artifact, but I suggest that is not about copyrightable subject > matter in the artifact. Actually it is. The only claim they could legally have _is_ on the generated bit that are substantial piece of code copied from template they provide, namely in the case of a bison generated parser the whole parser skeleton needed to exploit the generated state-graph. the whole paragraph is about the copyright disposition of these bits. and in the case of bison they explicitly grant you a license to use these bits in the 'normal' use case... my point being that the existence of that paragraph also disprove the assertion that 'computer generated => no copyright' You could write a program that print itself... the mere fact that it print itself does not mean you lose the copyright on your program... That being said, I do think you are on the clear with the Visual Studio generated cruft... but not merely because there is 'computer generation' involved. Norbert
