Some time ago I actually did some minor work in this field, as one of my post-docs.
The idea was to emulate a portion of the edge detection/image enhancement features of the retina by trying to assemble a bacteriorhodopsin thin film onto a CCD camera/silicon substrate
This is quite old work but I believe there is still some active work in this area. The original reference is in the edition
Proceedings of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 1997:
http://psb.stanford.edu/psb97/
Some of these proceedings are available on Google Books. I can't seem to find the 1997 one but it may be there. I can send it to you if that is helpful.
At least in the state of Florida, you can not file for copyright infringement unless you actually own the copyright.
Now there are ways to try and prove you created the code, but owning the copyright is the easiest way to do this...it is easy to file and costs perhaps $50.
Now perhaps you could try to "prove" you created the code first, but my point is that the law does provide some straightforward and expensive ways to establish legal ownership.
You can file for copyright infringement if someone copies just a few lines of code. I am pretty can provide references to the legal cases which establish this.
If Facebook wanted to avoid problems, they should have developed (or re-developed) their application using "clean-room" methods.
IMHO, if they copied the guys code and he actually owned the copyright, they should both pay damages and possibly face criminal charges. Period.
I personally experience this quite a bit, especially when coding, but also in other things
I studied physics and math (and have a PhD) and was also taught not waste my time memorizing useless facts and instead to know how to look things up (for example, one of my professors (the late Robert Mills of Yang-Mills theory) always set the speed of light c = 1). Indeed, I was never great at memorization, and if I was, I probably would have gone to med school instead of grad school. I have old high school friends, however, who seem to remember trivial from 25 years ago.
Consequently, while I code all day long, and have been doing so for many years, but I rely heavily on Google, the IDE, books, and my previous works. Indeed, there are times I can not spit out code details, yet I am very efficient when I need to be.
This is because realize that recall and recognition are two different mental processes, and I have an extensive library.
Unfortunately, on some contract interviews, as most programmers know, you are sometimes asked to write code on a blackboard or to debug a printed page of code.
Indeed, I have actually met CS students who were forced to code without an IDE.
That is really shocking to me. I generally find that I am completely incapable of doing these kinds of memory-focussed tasks.
These kinds of questions always seem like giving an author a spelling quiz...you can clearly be a great write and not need to know how to spell at all (you have both a spell checker and an editor)
I think it is more than the IDE though--I explicitly and actively try not to remember code details bur instead I remember where I can find them, where clearly other programmers must actively focus on the details and be able to retain them.
Maybe the CS way of saying this is that I try to remember the index of the data, not the data itself.
( If I do too much of this though, I find that I start to fool myself into thinking I actually know what is going on, and so I try to strike a good balance. )
I have not read the cases here specifically, but there is some good law on this.
If you file for the copyright, then it's your code.
If someone uses it without your permission, that's a crime (and a serious one)
Problem is, you can not sue someone and also threaten them with a crime at the same time. In other words, a you (or rather, your lawyer) can not try to coerce someone to settle a civil case by threatening them with criminal action because that is a violation of the legal ethics under most state bars.
On the other hand, if they did not file for copyright on the original code, then they would at least need a contract stating who owns the code (i.e. an assignment of rights). Without an explicit contract, generally the law says that the software contractors owns the right to the source code (and is basically just providing object code to the client)
I have a PhD in computational science from on of the top schools in the country and have over 10 years of real experience and I am constantly turned down for contracts because I am overqualified.
Most managers don't want well educated and trained employees. They want cheap, disposable, moderate quality, medicore workers.
I am dissapointed but not suprised with the complete lack of civility and professionalism displated by Yahoo's vulgar statements.
And I certainly would not compare Yahoo's meager, minor, and insigniificant technical accomplishment of creating an email program with the mathematical genius of code-breaking, which saved countless millions of lives and stopped the spread of Nazi Facism and genocide.
Get a grip.
The point is that Google is not above the law.
This is a terrible story to read.
In any real sense, if the manager harassed her so badly, and her unborn children were injured as a result, it sounds like there is more than just a civil case here.
If I were the her or her husband, when the civil case is over, I would find someone in the state's attorney's office to investigate criminal charges against both the manager as an individual and Google as a corporation for something like contributory criminal negligence, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, etc.
If he/she purposely put her under pressure to injur her, then the manager seems to be only a few steps away from Scott Peterson
A freind who is a high powered criminal corporate procescutor puts it like this...
For most companies, as soon as they realize that they can not steal from you, they will fire you and find someone else to steal from.
He calls most businessmen "theives in suits"
The common hustle in the valley is to convince someone that they are working on something "great," and the to get them to work for free (at night, on the weekends, on their vacation time, etc).
It is like the quote from Cadyshack..."you will get nothing and like it ! "
I enjoy working on interesting things; the more they pay, the more interesting it is.
There is reasonable solution to these problems, and that is to organize a national software contactors union.
The union would help structure contracts and help providing bonding and indemification for its workers.
Thanks for alerting me to this.
I'm still waiting to see if anyone goes to jail
Just recently, about 50 internet start-up firms, along with the underwriters, a number of bbanks, etc, all came together to settle one of the most complex SEC invetsigations ever conducted. In total, they paid $ 1 billion in fines. Divide this by the 50 or so guilty parties, and we find only a $20 million fine, and no jail time, for each guitly party.
Some poor schmuck wanting to help us all watch some free porn (an illiegal product anyway in many communities) gets 10X that
(BTW, the fact that the porn is illegal is an important point, because many arguments on this forum keep saying, "too bad, what he did is illegal, so we need to change the law." This is not the case, since we can also argue simply not to enforce the law)
Recently here in Florida, a major settlement against the Tobacco companies was reversed because the award was so large it would have bankrupted the company.
These companies sold poison to people for over a hundred of years, and they get a slap on the wrist.
Lets not forget that DirectTV, AT&T, and the others are make money distributing hard core pornography (see Frontline on-line for a discussion of this). Are these companies liable for the health and welfare of the actors? Are they prosecuted under local obscenity laws?
Are they held accountable when it turns out their business partners are tie to organized criminal outfits?
Let's try to remember that these companies are using public resources at a pittance cost. Does anyone remember the arguments against commercializing the Internet? How well did MCI-WorldCom do? Is anyone in jail yet?
Wait, what about all the criminal activity in the interent start-ups? One Billion Dollars later, is anyone in jail?
Illegal or not, the laws are enforced with impunity, and corporate interests are protected at all costs.
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Some time ago I actually did some minor work in this field, as one of my post-docs. The idea was to emulate a portion of the edge detection/image enhancement features of the retina by trying to assemble a bacteriorhodopsin thin film onto a CCD camera/silicon substrate This is quite old work but I believe there is still some active work in this area. The original reference is in the edition Proceedings of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 1997: http://psb.stanford.edu/psb97/ Some of these proceedings are available on Google Books. I can't seem to find the 1997 one but it may be there. I can send it to you if that is helpful.
Stealing an "idea" and stealing "sourcecode" are two totally different things
At least in the state of Florida, you can not file for copyright infringement unless you actually own the copyright.
Now there are ways to try and prove you created the code, but owning the copyright is the easiest way to do this...it is easy to file and costs perhaps $50.
Now perhaps you could try to "prove" you created the code first, but my point is that the law does provide some straightforward and expensive ways to establish legal ownership.
You can file for copyright infringement if someone copies just a few lines of code. I am pretty can provide references to the legal cases which establish this.
If Facebook wanted to avoid problems, they should have developed (or re-developed) their application using "clean-room" methods.
IMHO, if they copied the guys code and he actually owned the copyright, they should both pay damages and possibly face criminal charges. Period.
Copyright infringement
I personally experience this quite a bit, especially when coding, but also in other things I studied physics and math (and have a PhD) and was also taught not waste my time memorizing useless facts and instead to know how to look things up (for example, one of my professors (the late Robert Mills of Yang-Mills theory) always set the speed of light c = 1). Indeed, I was never great at memorization, and if I was, I probably would have gone to med school instead of grad school. I have old high school friends, however, who seem to remember trivial from 25 years ago. Consequently, while I code all day long, and have been doing so for many years, but I rely heavily on Google, the IDE, books, and my previous works. Indeed, there are times I can not spit out code details, yet I am very efficient when I need to be. This is because realize that recall and recognition are two different mental processes, and I have an extensive library. Unfortunately, on some contract interviews, as most programmers know, you are sometimes asked to write code on a blackboard or to debug a printed page of code. Indeed, I have actually met CS students who were forced to code without an IDE. That is really shocking to me. I generally find that I am completely incapable of doing these kinds of memory-focussed tasks. These kinds of questions always seem like giving an author a spelling quiz...you can clearly be a great write and not need to know how to spell at all (you have both a spell checker and an editor) I think it is more than the IDE though--I explicitly and actively try not to remember code details bur instead I remember where I can find them, where clearly other programmers must actively focus on the details and be able to retain them. Maybe the CS way of saying this is that I try to remember the index of the data, not the data itself. ( If I do too much of this though, I find that I start to fool myself into thinking I actually know what is going on, and so I try to strike a good balance. )
I have not read the cases here specifically, but there is some good law on this. If you file for the copyright, then it's your code. If someone uses it without your permission, that's a crime (and a serious one) Problem is, you can not sue someone and also threaten them with a crime at the same time. In other words, a you (or rather, your lawyer) can not try to coerce someone to settle a civil case by threatening them with criminal action because that is a violation of the legal ethics under most state bars. On the other hand, if they did not file for copyright on the original code, then they would at least need a contract stating who owns the code (i.e. an assignment of rights). Without an explicit contract, generally the law says that the software contractors owns the right to the source code (and is basically just providing object code to the client)
This is right on target
I have a PhD in computational science from on of the top schools in the country and have over 10 years of real experience and I am constantly turned down for contracts because I am overqualified. Most managers don't want well educated and trained employees. They want cheap, disposable, moderate quality, medicore workers.
How-a-bout getting a piece of ass...maybe that will help clarify things...then you can waste all your money on that
I am dissapointed but not suprised with the complete lack of civility and professionalism displated by Yahoo's vulgar statements. And I certainly would not compare Yahoo's meager, minor, and insigniificant technical accomplishment of creating an email program with the mathematical genius of code-breaking, which saved countless millions of lives and stopped the spread of Nazi Facism and genocide. Get a grip.
The point is that Google is not above the law. This is a terrible story to read. In any real sense, if the manager harassed her so badly, and her unborn children were injured as a result, it sounds like there is more than just a civil case here. If I were the her or her husband, when the civil case is over, I would find someone in the state's attorney's office to investigate criminal charges against both the manager as an individual and Google as a corporation for something like contributory criminal negligence, involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, etc. If he/she purposely put her under pressure to injur her, then the manager seems to be only a few steps away from Scott Peterson
A freind who is a high powered criminal corporate procescutor puts it like this... For most companies, as soon as they realize that they can not steal from you, they will fire you and find someone else to steal from. He calls most businessmen "theives in suits"
The common hustle in the valley is to convince someone that they are working on something "great," and the to get them to work for free (at night, on the weekends, on their vacation time, etc). It is like the quote from Cadyshack..."you will get nothing and like it ! " I enjoy working on interesting things; the more they pay, the more interesting it is.
There is reasonable solution to these problems, and that is to organize a national software contactors union. The union would help structure contracts and help providing bonding and indemification for its workers.
Thanks for alerting me to this. I'm still waiting to see if anyone goes to jail Just recently, about 50 internet start-up firms, along with the underwriters, a number of bbanks, etc, all came together to settle one of the most complex SEC invetsigations ever conducted. In total, they paid $ 1 billion in fines. Divide this by the 50 or so guilty parties, and we find only a $20 million fine, and no jail time, for each guitly party. Some poor schmuck wanting to help us all watch some free porn (an illiegal product anyway in many communities) gets 10X that (BTW, the fact that the porn is illegal is an important point, because many arguments on this forum keep saying, "too bad, what he did is illegal, so we need to change the law." This is not the case, since we can also argue simply not to enforce the law)
Recently here in Florida, a major settlement against the Tobacco companies was reversed because the award was so large it would have bankrupted the company. These companies sold poison to people for over a hundred of years, and they get a slap on the wrist.
Lets not forget that DirectTV, AT&T, and the others are make money distributing hard core pornography (see Frontline on-line for a discussion of this). Are these companies liable for the health and welfare of the actors? Are they prosecuted under local obscenity laws? Are they held accountable when it turns out their business partners are tie to organized criminal outfits?
Let's try to remember that these companies are using public resources at a pittance cost. Does anyone remember the arguments against commercializing the Internet? How well did MCI-WorldCom do? Is anyone in jail yet? Wait, what about all the criminal activity in the interent start-ups? One Billion Dollars later, is anyone in jail?
Illegal or not, the laws are enforced with impunity, and corporate interests are protected at all costs.