At 8:42 AM -0700 8/5/98, Colin Wood wrote:
>Brad Salai wrote:
>> Colin Wood wrote:
<snip>
>> The leading case on this involved copying a telephone directory. The US
>> Supreme Court decided that the information (names, addresses and phone
>> numbers) in a telephone directory could be copied without infringing,
>> even though it took a lot of work to assemble it. They said that these
>> were pure factual things, not subject to copyright. They threw out the
>> so called sweat of the brow test which previously had given protection
>> to things that took a lot of work to assemble.
>
>that's hilarious.  i'm surprised no encyclopedias were ever involved in
>cases like this :-)

It is even more bizzare than that, The page numbers of books that report
court decisions have been copyrighted for years. This is in part because
the law book publishers have a lot of money to spend. but even though you
can freely copy what is on the pages, you can't use the page numbers.

>
>> Since Colin does this for a living
>
>well, not really.  i validate processors for a living.  i just play around
>with netbsd on the side when i have time ;-)
>
>> I expect he knows all of this, (the
>> reference to the mythical kind kernal hacker (KKH) writing the spec is
>> what I was talking about)  but I wanted to clarify a little. The KKH can
>> use the Linux code to document the hardware, it doesn't have to be the
>> person who wrote the code who does it.
>
>of course!  however, i think that there is a rather fine line between
>using someone else's code as documentation and wholesale copying from it.
>i'd hate to be the person who has to prove that my code was original work
>given that it looks just like this other guy's code i've looked at ;-)
>
Actually, you would be in trouble. If you have had access to copyrighted
stuff, and your code is substantially similar, you will probably lose.
That's why the clean room approach is used. It is common for there to be at
least some similarity between code written by two different people to do
the same thing. Since access + substantial similarity ~= copyright
infringement, the only thing you can do to protect yourself is eliminate
access, ergo-> clean room.

But the point of all this is that information about hardware that has been
developed by one person and used in his code can be used by someone else
without infringement if the second person is careful to take only the
factual ideas, not the copyrightable expression, which I suspect isn't much
in a lot of cases, and if possible without access to the original code.

Seems like we ought to have some people who are knowlegable look at any GPL
code that performs functions we need, and extract the information we need,
and provide it to a separate group of coders who actually create the BSD
code.
It would take a little organization, but big companies do it all the time.


Brad

Stephen B. Salai                            Phone (716) 325-5553
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