On 6/1/07, M. David Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 6/1/07, Curt Hagenlocher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Independent rediscovery" does not protect you from claims of patent > infringement, only from copyright infringement. > Unless I am misreading, it seems you are suggesting that the protection comes in the form of copyright, not patent, and therefore could present a problem. Have I misinterpreted?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I want to contribute source code to the "ZincPython" project. There are two ways that my work could cause legal problems: it might infringe on someone's patent, or it might be copied wholesale from someone else's work. For patent infringement, it doesn't really matter where the code came from -- I wrote it, I copied it, I channeled it from a 12,000-year-old programmer named Klaatu -- if it infringes, it infringes. In order for copyright violation to have happened, on the other hand, I have to actually have had access to the code being copied. Some projects apparently try to protect themselves from *claims* of copyright violation by asking that their donors refrain from looking at similar or related (and usually competing) source code. Now that I think about it, though, reading someone else's source code might expose me to a clever idea that (unbeknownst to me) is patented -- thereby increasing the risk that I inadvertently infringe on a patent when I independently reimplement similar functionality. I guess I'm just biased against that idea because brilliant technique so rarely seems important to me. -- Curt Hagenlocher [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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