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| Authored by: bugstomper on Saturday, April 28 2012 @ 06:44 PM EDT |
I will concede, Anonymous, that you have written C header files that contain
comments that you can run Doxygen over to generate documentation. To do that you
must have the ability to read and follow technical references on C programming
and use of Doxygen.
You have not demonstrated an ability to understand plain English posted here in
comments. Or maybe my statements, though moronic and idiotic, were still over
your head.
1. I did not say that Harry Potter was generated by a Javadoc like process which
would produce only a TOC or outline. I said that if a book like Harry Potter was
put into a file such as a WordPerfect or LaTeX file, which combines markup and
the actual content, and that file is sent to the printing company to be
processed and printed, obviously the book is covered by the same copyright in
either form. There is nothing to say about the print copy being a
"derivative" of the source file.
2. Similarly, if Java source files contain comments that describe the detailed
specifications of classes and methods, comments written in English with
sufficient complexity and creativity to be copyrightable and not so constrained
as to be considered scènes à faire, then those comments can be copyrightable,
whether in their source form or in the documentation generated by Javadoc.
3. The names and method signatures in the source code and the generated
documentation would not be copyrightable.
4. When you referred to C headers in saying that the information in them are
just facts about the API and not copyrightable, I assumed that you were not
talking about self-documenting C programs run through doxygen. Clearly doxygen
has a similar function to javadoc, and if you put copyrightable English comments
in the headers to create the documentation then you do have copyrightable
content.
5. Now I see that you are talking about the C headers that you write, which
contain English comments about specification. You feel that your comments are
not deserving of copyright protection because they are still just facts about
the API. Maybe that is true for simple comments that you write, IANAL and I
could not say for sure. But Oracle certainly claims that those parts of the Java
Specification are subject to copyright, Google seems to agree, and both agree
the Google wrote those portions themselves instead of copying.
6. Yes, you can use doxygen in C headers in a manner similar to javadoc in Java.
Javadoc was around in 1995. Doxygen 0.1 was released in 1997. The concept of
documentation generated from comments in code was around before either of them.
Knuth developed Web and Weave around 1981. CWeb was released I think around
1987, so at least by then it was possible to write a self-documenting C program.
That doesn't mean many people did it before Doxygen. Like another commenter here
I did make a little use of a primitive form of that feature in some PDP-10 and
PDP-11 assembler code I wrote in the 1970's. When someone talks about C header
files I usually don't think of documentation-generating code. I had pretty much
stopped coding in C or C++ professionally by 1997 so never got into using
doxygen, nowadays using mostly Java, perl, python, Lisp, and PHP. So I think of
Java when I think of common practices that professional developers use to make
their code generate its own documentation.
7. In any case my point is that copyrights of the Java Specification document,
whatever those copyrights are, would have to be the same as the copyrights on
the source code files not counting the implementation code, because the
documentation is just a rendering of the portion of the source files that are
processed by javadoc.
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