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| Authored by: albert on Sunday, July 07 2013 @ 01:19 PM EDT |
on any subject. Writing is just a collection of words and phrases, arranged in
a particular order. That 'arrangement' is the copyrightable work. You can't
copyright individual words and phrases. It's a deterrent to someone copying your
work. Often, the line between plagiarism and original work must be decided in
court.
The law specifies that the copyright does not "...extend to any idea,
procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or
discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained,
illustrated, or embodied in such work..."
Oracle, I believe, is trying to do just that. They're trying to make copyright
law function as patent law, using smoke, mirrors, and hand waving. They want to
own the ideas.
Copyright law, as we quoted (17 USC ยง 102b), specifically prohibits this.
How many of us have written RangeCheck-like functions? Odds are, some will use
the same code, because of the tight restrictions on proper syntax enforced by
the programming language, and the requirement to make it fast and tight. The
fact that the expressions of the function are similar has no bearing. Enforcing
a copyright on your version, prohibits anyone else from writing such a function.
This is not the intent of the law, IMO.
Say, Oracle, try patenting the RangeCheck function, and see how far that gets
ya.
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| Authored by: hardmath on Sunday, July 07 2013 @ 03:25 PM EDT |
My understanding is that copyright extends to the (fixed)
form of original
expression, even where a work expresses
belief, opinion, or a software
program.
As albert says, this protection does not extend beyond the
form of
original expression to cover
underlying/incapsulated/implemented ideas or
functions.
Infringement must be tied to copying the form of expression,
whether literally or as a derivative work.
When there is a conflict, as
when copying is done for the
sake of a method of operation, Google cited case
law to the
effect that the right to independently implement a
compatible
method of operation defeats the copyright
protection, but only to the extent
necessary for such
implementation. E.g. copying a header file might be
infringing if the file also contains extensive comments that
are expressive of
the author's design philosophy or
development history. Thus the filtration
test: elements
that are not necessary for a functional purpose retain their
protectability.
I cannot read Google's brief as you seem to. Their logic
seems to be that a functional purpose weakens the extent of
copyright
protection without eliminating it. I'm not
familiar with a court ruling that
an original expression did
not deserve copyright protection because it
expressed
beliefs or opinions (which would seem to be normative of
documents
prepared before the computer era). Certainly the
US Congress
amended copyright
statutes in 1980 to included software
programs as protectable
works.
---
Rosser's trick: "For every proof of me, there is a shorter
proof of my negation". [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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