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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 15 2012 @ 07:55 PM EDT |
It's not just the order of the "if" statements. It's everything - do
you name your variables the same, do you do your indenting the same, do you use
tabs or spaces, do you put curly braces around single lines, do your comments
contain the exact same text (if there are any), are your compares done in the
same direction ("a < b" or "b >= a"). There's a ton
of differences that are possible, and if I understand correctly, these functions
are byte-for-byte identical.
And Google does not dispute that they were, in fact, copied.
MSS2[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: pem on Tuesday, May 15 2012 @ 07:55 PM EDT |
If you can prove independent creation, there is no copyright violation.
Copyrights are different than patents in this respect.
This is why there is a lot of focus on "clean room" processes.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 15 2012 @ 11:33 PM EDT |
Doesn't the Copyright Act declare that only Copyrightable Works of Authorship
can claim copyright protection?
"Authorship" has a very specific meaning in the Act involving the
personal and distinctive contribution made by the author, but the rangeCheck
function is one of the most functional snippets of code one could possibly
imagine, since there is no insight, design, form, and certainly no craft or
artistry involved in creating it.
What rangeCheck does follows directly from its functional requirement to check
those ranges, and there is next to no leeway in how one might do this, certainly
nothing worthy of copyright. If this is a "Work of Authorship" in the
specific meaning of the Act (which does not simply mean "writing")
then Hello World would be as well, and we'd be heading rapidly into territory of
the surreal.
Personally, I do not think that rangeCheck qualifies as a Copyrightable Work of
Authorship. There has to be a line drawn somewhere to exclude code that does
not qualify, and I seriously doubt that writing a rangeCheck function represents
a sufficient personal contribution to merit copyright protection.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 16 2012 @ 06:08 AM EDT |
The Jury decided that 100% copying *WAS* de-minimis
The Judge Overturned it.
The Jury decide that 9 lines out of 3000 was *NOT* deminimis
And now we're arguing about how much it's worth?
Rachel King is right, this case is a mess.
It would not have been a mess had Oracle not lied at the beginning.
Had abstraction/filtration been performed on the source code (as it should be),
the only thing left in the copyright phase would be the 8 test files for which
the correct standard for the "whole work" is the entire platform and
thus de-minimis.
Copyright should have been summarily judged before commencement. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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