Slashdot Mirror
Source Code & Copyright
cunamara writes "Patently-O has posted a discussion of Aharonian v. Gonzales . Aharonian is trying to build a database of source code as a repository of prior art. The interesting thing is in part of the decision, which is that "Conversely, if plaintiff independently creates software that is functionally identical to other software, he does not infringe any copyright on the other software's source code, even if his independently created source code is nearly identical to the copyrighted source code." Interesting. But how does one defend "nearly identical" independently created source code from a copyright infringement lawsuit?" I'm actually not as interested in the copyright side of things as I am in the notion of using something like that for prior art of software patents. The argument that source code is uncopyrightable, with some extensions could be applied to almost all, say, fiction stories since no one's written a truly new story in like five thousand years.
I'm not a big fan of "near-identical" copyrighting source code.. It's almost like copyrighting mathematical equations. The compiler creates a framework designed to achieve predictable results, and whatever results are achieved within that framework, isn't the invention of genius, but the application of an engineering language. It's cclearly wrong to rip off chunks of people's programming and sell it as your own, but if there's proof of linear progression of programming which achieves a similiar function using a similiar process within the programming framework, there's no reason the other's work should be thrown out, or licensed against the 'prior artists'. Intellectual property is going to be such a freaking headache if shit like this is allowed to continue.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
the argument that source code is uncopyrightable, with some extensions could be applied to almost all, say, fiction stories since no one's written a truly new story in like five thousand years.
The idea is not what is protected under copyright, it is the work itself which is protected under copyright. Just because the idea implemented in a story (or computer program for that matter) has been done before, that does not mean that someones actual book, movie or videogame is somehow immune from copyright.
Patents, on the other hand... Well, let's not get started on patents...
For US citizens it important to get organised. FFII has an USA mailing list. Perhaps it might serve as a breeding ground for a US campaign which becomes equivalent to the EU campaign effort. Americans are perfect communicators in the field of software patents but lack anti-swpat organisation.
Currently the rest of the world suffers from the American unability to get anti-Software Patent interests organised.
Dismissed. The case is now on appeal.
The idea that something may not infringe copyright in spite of the fact that it is nearly identical, is a bit of a stretch. It is true sometimes. For instance, if there is a standard way of doing things then bits of code will be identical. On the other hand, for those bits of code that may be copyrighted, the statement sounds nonsensical. Remember, not all code can be copyrighted. Much/most/all the code SCO claimed was in violation of its (disputed) copyrights is not copyrightable.
For example, there aren't much variation in ways to code a doubly linked list. If a project in java needs one, you need to write it yourself, because it isn't in java.util.* yet. With a standard coding style in that language, I've seen quite a few near identical looking implementations for an assignment.
It's about time to stop suing over one snippet of code in a project - there are only so many ways to do the basic tasks. It's how you use the individual lego blocks to build something that counts - if you copy the whole design and claim it as your own, then you deserve to be sued, not for using five white ones to build a wall, as everyone does that.
In the first sentence, it's clear that the emphasis is on "five thousand years", as the author intended. In the second it is not clear where the emphasis is. Is it on the "truely new story", "no one's", "written". Is the entire sentence meant to be taken as exclamatory?
True, the editor could have used "...in over five thousand years" or perhaps even "...a truly new story; in five thousand years!", but I think the "like" gives enough pause and emphasis to the sentance to truely carry across the authors point.
People aren't using "like" flippantly for no reason. Sometimes it is used like "umm" and "aaa", but sometimes it is, like, very useful in emphasising certain sections of the sentence. OK?
May the Maths Be with you!
Mathematical formulas are not copyrightable.
Next !
Google Books seems like an ideal solution to this problem. Of course, I'd talk to Google about it first. Your source code repository would be transformed into book form with the source code as large excerpts and the revision control system being your chapter introductions. This would force the repository to be something organized and not just a mish-mash of inserted code. Their About page says that they'll show you a couple of pages. I would ask them to restrict the search to only showing the section introduction and a 15 lines surrounding the code in question. Google could then wrap an API around it to make it easy to programatically search.
Then, there's the issue of licensing. This would be, I think, the first legitimate use of the GPL (not the LGPL) for a published document. Google promises to protect the work as a dark search until valid copyrights expire. If you put a hypertext link into each section where the code can be properly licensed (i.e. downloaded), then it works as a prior art repository and as a code reuse archive.
I'm not a big fan of "near-identical" copyrighting source code.. It's almost like copyrighting mathematical equations.
It's not just like it. It is copyrighting mathematical equations, or more appropriately, mathematical algorithms. All software is a mathematical algorithm.
Of course, publications containing mathematical algorithms are copyrighted every day. Papers, books, lecture notes, etc, etc. But to argue that if I've used a Fourier Transform in my paper means you can't is obviously a fallacy. To argue that you can't even if you change the symbols or the presentation is ludacrious.
Same goes for code.
May the Maths Be with you!
I think the truth is that people instinctively know that copyrights (and patents esp on software) are harmfull, and that's why there are so many legal challanges to it and attempts to reform copyright law. But the truth is that the system is not going to change.
Rather than playing all sorts of legal tricks, I think people would be better served with outright defiance. Ignore copyrights no matter what, use technology to secure that right in the best way's possible, and eventually the system will come arround after it's totally obvious that they're irrelavent.
I know that the few examples of people they've attacked and left strung up to die were pretty harsh, but in practice the risks of being left behind in the information age and not getting practical use out of the code out there far exceed the risks of getting pounced by the legal system. In all truth, people are better off ignoring the legal witch hunt and just go on doing what they need to.
Er, what's wrong with java.util.LinkedList?
I fear that in today's society, the Adelphi charter is irrelevant and misdirected.
Keep in mind the real priorties:
1: Corporate rights shall be preserved.
2: Corporate freedom of action shall be maximized.
3: Opportunity for revenue and profit shall not be impeded.
I just went to see "Why We Fight" this weekend, including a Q&A with the writer/director, afterward. To be short, sweet, and simple, it wasn't a rant against the Bush administration. They are merely the latest (and most willing?) phase in the rise to power of the military-industrial complex. The movie was a warning about corporatism, rooted in Ike's parting message about the military-industrial complex.
In retrospect, the Free Software movement is perhaps one of the most important ones in today's world. As far as I can tell, it is the ONLY major endeavour of modern life not utterly dominated by corporate interests. No wonder there is so much interest in things like the DMCA, DRM, HDMI, TPM, etc. I suspect the fine-tuning will be to push Free Sofware into the correct corral, so it's developments can continue to be harvested, yet at the same time make it irrelevant to day-today life.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The problem with software patents is not copyright it's trade secrets. The source code is never released, so no database of prior art can cover any closed source software. The more innovative the algorithms, the more likely it will be strongly protected with tradesecrets and the less useful a prior art database would be.
Not only that, the source code isn't always a good description of an algorithm which is why every project I've ever worked on has lots of comments and documentation delivered with it.
So I don't see what the point of building a database of prior art actually achieves! How is it different from the GNU libraries? They're partial coverage of software available in sourcecode form too.
Bold comment, but I would say compleatly untrue. Sure if you define a story in broad terms like "a romance that is forbiden and it ends with a tragedy" you can fit a few thousand books, movies and plays into that. But only one of those is "Romeu and Juliet", would you say that all of those are the same?
I guess you will try to argue that the newer are "rip-offs" from the original. But I would say that there's no culture without "riping off". Coping and improving is what we do, and when is done well it can be good, very good. Most of the music is done in a similar way, good musitian influence the newer generation and were infuenced by big names that he used to hear when he was young.
I believe that all this race to protect every single idea that can be selled to the point that people can't replay a "buffy episode" in the comunity theather or Joseph Doe can't create a fan fiction featuring batman or maybe "batguy" is bad for the culture in general.
All that said, I would like to say that if this Joseph Doe character starts selling, or attempt to get a profit from his fan-fiction, then maybe the original authors could ask for a piece of those profits.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
If every bit of code was copyrightable, even a "Hello World" program would be a copyright infringement if it were copied out of a book and posted to the web. In this context, it is easy to see that not everything is eligible for copyright.
Every bit of originally created source code is copyrightable...although in many cases code is copied from a public, common, source, like "Hello World".
For infringement to take place, you need to demonstrate that copying took place, that is, that the accused copier had access to the original and used it. Even if the source code is nearly identical, it does not mean there was infringement. You need to establish the copier had access to, and used, the original to create his copy.
I'm not sure a repository is useful for copyright issues. Those are proving minor, anyhow. For patent issues it would be very powerful, but there is another problem. The USPTO doesn't check outside the application and patent database. That is, if something HAS prior art, but that prior art is not patented or included in the application, then the patent examiner will grant the patent anyway in ignorance. The burden then falls on the holder of the prior art to establish that it is prior art. Which means hiring lawyers, litigating a case, etc. It is a PITA. And this is one of the principal ways the system is borked. Patent examiners have no means by which they can access prior art that is not in the system.
Two decades ago when doing stupid things with neural nets was fashionable in computer science, I built a neural net C compiler. Odd thing is it worked on small programs so I expanded it.
...
Its parser would takes code of the form foo=foo+bar; and reduces it to foo+=bar; or other minimal C with translation to var1+=var2; It would then hand that off to the NN compiler. It then ran every bit of C code I could find through it. Its interesting that there were only about 160 (if I remember right) common statements that appeared more than once and most of them were followed by a very limited subset of other statements.
If you reduced a program another step into:
common_line1;
common_line23;
common_line7;
It ended up that many bits of code where exactly the same in many programs or had very small differences.
The most interesting stat was most C used less than about 100 common statements but the guys at Bells Labs added about 40 (of which I think Joe Ossanna was responsible for 30 or so) and BSD guys added about 10. The IOCCC entries didn't change the results but I don't think the compiler ever got any of them right even after a cb and extra reduction step which says something about their code.
The argument that source code is uncopyrightable, with some extensions could be applied to almost all, say, fiction stories since no one's written a truly new story in like five thousand years.
The difference is that programming languages are usually pretty logical and to achieve an aim there's usually an obvious and correct way of solving a problem. For example if I asked a collection of programmers to write a function to sum the elements of an array it would inevitably look like the following (for C at least).
int sumArray(int array[], int elements) {
int i, t = 0;
for (i = 0; i elements; i++) t += array[i];
return t;
}
There would be variations but everyone would essentially write the same code.
When writing literature, writers are restricted by the language, but for some they are extremely flexible and the same concepts can be written about and result in a completely different book.
It's the same for any art. The Queen of England has had hundreds of portrates painted and yet they are all very different depite the use of similar materials. Yes the basic subject is the same but you cannot say the paintings are the same. Coding is more like photography.
At it's extreme source code is a mathematical description of an algorithm. It's either write or wrong. I can't see how you can copywrite it any more than copywriting 2 + 2 = 4.
What they wrote ended up having large bursts of code that was identical to the IBM PC BIOS. Sometimes there is only one good way of doing something.
Well, this is what I remembered reading years ago. It was an unusual exercise because the actual amount of code was small, so the potential legal cost per byte was very high. If there is someone out there who actually was part of this project, maybe they can post their experiences, and say whether I have got it vaguely right.
Copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. It is the expression of the idea which creates value for the copyrighted work. Anyone can write a 4-bar blues progression in a-Major, just don't rip off B.B. King's lyrics or melody while you're doing it. We become richer, intellectually, as a society when creators are forced to think beyond what's already been done, to create their own expression of common cultural ideas, not by letting a bunch of hacks monkey around with things which they would otherwise not be able to create on their own.
Well, there may be public domain prior art, but I think you hit on a real point. People are trying to use all these tricks to get arround problems caused by copyrights. I think the real solution is to get rid of copyrights, not to try and play games with the system. The game playing will only have short term results.
fiction stories since no one's written a truly new story in like five thousand years.
People wrote original fictions back 5 thousand years ago? heh! Imagine that.
Mountain: the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Bare-Foot Enterprise. Its five stone mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new food and new women; to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Ahh... that's where it came from...
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
While I don't like the idea of patents in software - there is one huge advantage of patents: when the patent expires, the patented technology becomes Public Domain and can never be patented again.
Patents have a maximum life of 20 years as opposed to copywrites - which for all practical purposes - are forever. Nobody alive today is likely to see Mickey Mouse become public domain, even though copywrites are supposed to be for a 'limited' time.
Patents are viewed by the patent office as a 'teaching method'; when discussing a patent an examiner will say something like: "Willford (referring to a patent by the name of the primary inventor) teaches so and so..." As such patents are a very useful record of how to do things; they keep technology from being lost when the people involved with it die. Because of this patents are very useful to society as a whole.
For example: Philo Farnsworth patented a vacuum tube which was able to produce controlled desktop thermonuclear fusion in 1967. The problem with the Farnsworth tube is that once the fusion reaction started the plasma became so hot that it was difficult to get more fuel into it. Of course, that is a problem with any hot fusion device; magnetic confinement simply hasn't reached the levels that Farnsworth achieved in 1967, so the problem has not yet become apparent in their research.
Had Farnsworth not patented his work (U.S. Patent number 3,386,883) we would have no record of what he did, and the thoughts of one of the most insightful inventors in history would have been lost forever.
The fusor tube is a brilliant design which deserves much more attention than it has received.
"It isn't (IMO) the content that is copyrighted as much as the meaning."
Other way around. That is, copyright protects a specific expression of an idea, which is to say a particular batch of words in a particular order. Ideas are, for the most part, not protected.
That said, there's a certain amount of fuzziness around exactly what is involved in the expression of an idea. Frex, a few years back, White Wolf Games sued the producers of the movie Underworld for lifting a number of elements from their games under, I believe, copyright law.
I haven't heard of any case where copyright was involving prior art defense.
Normally it's related to patents.
IOW. Person A written Program A to do the Task A. Person B written Program B to do the Task A. If task is the same there are very chances that the programs will be quite similar.
Now, from point of view of copyright law there are two absolutely different programmes - implementations of probably the same algorithm to solve the Task A. (Competition is good, isn't it?)
But, when patents get's involved, picture becomes more obscure. If Person A holds a patents for the algorithm of Program A (and since patents by definition "transcends it all" and disregards copyrights) implementation of Program B whilst having no relation to Program A nor to the Person A is in legal crux. (Here prior art starts playing role.)
Copyright protects person's work. Patent protects person's idea.
Two people might have come to the same idea (first to come entitled for the protection). But how it could be that two people independently made the same work? (e.g. book, picture, poem, etc) It's lunatism or what???
Specifically, when applied to software, prior art make no sense whatsoever. Modern obfuscation tools allow people to mask the original code. Was it stolen or written from scratch - one would never guess. (Obfuscators are normally applied to commercial Java programmes to make reverse engineering harder).
P.S. In my experience, when two commercial programs have same peice of code, it usually means that it was lifted from BSD. I yet to encounter single example when one software company stolen something from another. Average quality of commercial code is quite low - it's not worth been stolen. And when you see clean, well made code, rest assured: people behind the code are connected to Open Source. Open Source has to have higher quality - just as in normal life you would try to *NOT* show anybody you dirty undies.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
and thank you Hemos for displaying your ignorance on the front page.
This is exactly the crucial difference between copyrights and patents.
A copyright restricts you only from copying the work in question. There is absolutely no restriction on coming up with the same work independently, and using it. Thus like George Harrison's suit mentioned in the sibling post, many copyright suits depend on showing that someone did / didn't have access to the work in question.
A patent on the other hand gives the holder the exclusive right to an invention or idea. Like the other guy who invented the telephone independently of Bell, you will have absolutely no rights to your own invention if it has been previously patented, for the life of the patent anyway.
A defence of independent discovery works for copyright infringements, not for patents. This has always been the case, so I'm not sure why it's news today.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
1. Copyright exists from the moment of creation, regardless of whether the work is ever published, and regardless of whether there's a copyright notice. Formalities like including the notice and filing a registration can be very helpful, particularly if you want to sue an infringer and collect money from him, but they are necessary for the existence of the copyright.
2. The copyright holder enjoys five exclusive rights over his creation: the rights to copy, distribute, display, perform, and create derivative works. Derivative works include modifications, translations, etc. He can grant licenses to others to allow them to do any combination of these things. Running software mainly falls under the right to copy since you need to copy the work into temporary storage in order to use it. The GPL focuses mainly on the right to distribute.
3. Slightly oversimplified, the test for copyright infringement is access to the work plus "substantial similarity." If you had access to the original, and produce something substantially similar, the burden shifts to you to show non-infringement. If you didn't have access to the original, no infringement. Period. If the two works aren't substantially similar, no infringement. Period. Of course, the legal and factual determination of what constitutes substantial similarity is where it gets interesting.
4. Copyright does *not* protect ideas, only the *expression* of ideas. If there's only one way to express an idea, you can't copyright that expression. An example is a language (computer or otherwise) -- since the idea behind the language and the way it is expressed are inextricably linked (i.e., the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax), the idea of the language and its expression are said to have merged, resulting in no copyright. APIs often fall under this analysis as well -- if there's only one way to interface to a system, that interface may not be subject to copyright.
5. "Fair use" is a defense to infringement -- it applies where the court finds (based on a number of factors enumerated in the copyright act) that the infringement was excused because the social good resulting from the infringement outweighs the harm to the copyright holder. Except for the relatively few areas where the Supremes or enough circuit courts have made a ruling (as in the Betamax decision), you never an absolute guarantee that fair use will apply; it's always a roll of the dice based on how a court weighs all the factors.
(Note: the above is all based on US law. Most countries are roughly similar, but there are differences.)
You can't copyright a particular method of playing guitar. You can't copyright a process in writing a song. You can copyright the song itself, though. That is the end product of a creative process and should be considered unique to the artist.
As that relates to code, the code itself should not be copyrighted. In programming there are only so many ways to arrive at the same solution (sometimes), and copyrights could potentially remove ALL of those apporaches as options. The finished work should be copyrighted and protected in ways similar to music copyrights.
With music, if another artist clearly uses elements of the song in their own work without permission, it can be considered infringement. Software should be treated the same way. A user interface, a particular structure, and novel ideas should be copyrightable. It's the end result that is the work, the source is part of the creative process.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Well, for one thing the fact that it uses an implementation as the abstraction. The collections should have been things like set, ordered set, fifo sequence, etc... Furthermore they should have been interfaces, not classes.
You mean like the List, Set and Map interfaces?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I yet to encounter single example when one software company stolen something from another.
Cadence vs. Avant, the stolen code lawsuit lawsuit was settled for $265 million.
I am not American and so there may be points of your legal system that I misunderstand but to me it seems that the ability to patent business methods and software has muddied the waters. Patents are not the same thing as copyright.
Here in the UK you cannot patent a business method or software. However, you do own the copyright to any software you create. This means that someone cannot simply copy your code and market it as their own. However, someone can create their own software that does the same thing as yours.
The issue is not prior art. The issue is copying. If you feel that they have copied your work without permission you can sue, but you can't sue because they copied your idea.
::::not by letting a bunch of hacks monkey around with things which they would otherwise not be able to create on their own.
and yet there's that famous quote:
"If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." --Isaac Newton
I guess Newton was a simmian hack by your bounded thought.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I'm really tired of hearring people claim that there aren't any new stories written. It shows a basic ignorance of literature. I don't know if the purpose of such remarks is to dismiss modern literature as redundant or just some sort of glorification of the past or perhaps even to explain why the person makingt he remark does not bother to write original stories, but regardless, it's crap.
The simple fact of the matter is that although many common human stories have been told and retold for ages, there's a great volume of significant new work which is not about the retelling of old stories. Here's a list of works which I challenge anyone to find an older story which can reasonable be classified as being in any sense the same story.
Invisible Man by Ralph Elison
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Closing Time by Joseph Heller
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Watchmen by Alan Moore
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
Scud: The Disposable Assassin by Rob Schrab
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov
R.U.R. by Anton Capek
Fooly Cooly
And that's just a quick listing of what I could come up with off of the top of my head. So, before you make that claim again, answer the list. And no dodges. You can't simply claim that a story about hunting is sufficient for The Sound of Thunder, for instance. The principle idea of the story is not "some guys go hunting". It's about how small changes in the past can affect the future in a large way. You don't need another story which matches in every detail, but it must cover the fundament of the story.
Keith