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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, October 17 2012 @ 06:43 PM EDT |
This is in the Northern District of California; I believe the precedent there is
currently Judge Alsup's holding that neither the eight test files, nor the nine
lines of rangeCheck, are de minimis.
Much though we disliked that outcome, it does now put a large shadow over Twin
Peaks.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Tkilgore on Wednesday, October 17 2012 @ 07:46 PM EDT |
> That's my reading too. "Yes we stole it, but RedHat has only added a
tiny amount of code, and most of that is not covered." It's an interesting
reading of copyright law.
> If for example, I wrote one short poem which was included in an anthology
with 200 others, [...]
1. RedHat may know exactly who wrote all of that code and may already have
contacted those parties. These parties or some of them could conceivably file to
join the suit, or sue independently. Who knows? Some people get very excited if
they smell a GPL violation by Proprietary Company X or Y. Some of those who have
contributed heavily to the kernel or to basic utilities feel very strongly about
such matters, and with reason. We do not know one way or the other, of course,
but RedHat does not seem to have a history of going off half-cocked when it is
in a legal case.
2. We don't know how essential is the part of the code
which RedHat or people who are now working for the company or who are highly
sensitive to GPL violations of their own code might have contributed.
3. RedHat probably has access to a lot of people who are very good at reverse
engineering to see whether someone is telling the truth about using only dribs
and drabs of the GPL code, in a "de minimis" fashion. I would expect
them to have done thorough research before making the accusation, considering
that it would put the company in a difficult spot indeed if it were to make wild
accusations which in the end turn out to be nothing more than SCO-in-reverse.
4. One could keep adding items, but suffice it so say there is lots more that we
don't know. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: tknarr on Wednesday, October 17 2012 @ 08:12 PM EDT |
That argument about de minimis might work if, in your example, the plaintiff
was suing about copyright infringement on the entire book. But if you wrote a
poem and someone included it in a book, you'd be making your claim about the
copying of the poem, not the book. The work in question would be the poem, and
the contents of the rest of the book wouldn't be relevant to the question of
whether you copied the work in question in it's entirety. If that weren't the
case, I could package a large number of copyrighted works together and
distribute them and no copyright holder could sue me because no one of them
owned a significant fraction of what I was distributing. That's obviously not
the case. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 18 2012 @ 10:20 AM EDT |
In the Java case, Sun (Oracle's predecessor) filed a
registration for the whole SDK. That's the only
registration they brought into evidence in the case.
That made it pretty easy for Google's lawyers to argue
that the "work", for fair use and de minimis purposes, was
the entire JDK: tens of thousands of files.
If you have a copyright registration on one poem, and
somebody copies an anthology that includes your poem, you
are entitled to sue and the judge will consider that the
"work" you are suing over is your poem. Since the defendent
copied your entire work, the de minimis defense won't fly,
and a fair use defense would be very difficult.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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