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| Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 04:32 PM EDT |
I don't have a problem with the specification document being generated from the
comments in the source code. That isn't so different from the notion that a book
might be created in WordPerfect or LaTeX files, but eventually run through
software that formats and prints it. Would you argue that Harry Potter Volume I
is a derivative work of whatever file was sent to the printer? Whoever wrote a
piece of the Java Class Library Specification wrote it in the form of comments
in source code following a certain template and rigid writing style. To the
degree that the elements of what they wrote were determined by the
functionality, which would be true of the signatures and lists of parameter and
fields names and types, and to the degree that the order of listing is
alphabetical, then it is not copyrightable material. But the English
descriptions should be copyrightable even if they are written in comments in a
source file which are extracted to the print format of the Specifications book.
Of course, it is exactly those English specifications that nobody argues Google
copied.
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