Source Code & Copyright 182
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.
You'll find all the stories ever told (Score:1, Interesting)
All seventeen volumes of Sir Richard Burton's translation available at Project Gutenberg.
KFG
Intellectual Property Laws (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't need a truly new story... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
For US citizens it important to get organised. FFII has an USA mailing list [ffii.org]. 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.
There are a few ways to do something... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Diversionary Rubbish (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Google Books (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Books [google.com] 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 [google.com] 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.
Software == Maths (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Good Try, but bad approach (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Adelphi Charter + "Why We Fight" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
The people who are trying to impose copyrights and patnets understand that it's an all or nothing game, which is why they will never let a "reasonable" solution play out no matter what it is. Why is it that they can understand this, but it seems we can't?
Re:There are a few ways to do something... (Score:3, Interesting)
In my Java Data Structures class in University, our first couple of assignments were exactly this sort of thing. I think the first one was a singly linked list, and out of the 100 or so students 60 *identical* solutions were handed in. For the second assignment, a doubly linked list, there was more variation but still 30 or 40 identical solutions. We'd all learned Java in the same classes, we all had the same textbook, it's hardly surprising that there was so much similarity there.
Of course, when in our low-level C programming class that same year ten people handed in identical solutions to an assignment which had no textbook, no enforced coding style, and even the non-code questions were word-for-word the same, it was obvious we had a bit of copying going on...
new histories... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Most code is the same as some other code. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Literature is not source code... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Prior art is on the burden of the copyrighters (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Patents vs Copywrite (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Copyright is not universal (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:The Phoenix BIOS experiment (Score:4, Interesting)
With high-level languages, it would seem to be less likely to find large areas of similarity.
Copyright vs Patent (Score:2, Interesting)
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.