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Not just lawyers, but entire companies want to be paid for stuff like this. See Microsoft, for instance: > Microsoft focuses on Oracle's argument that copyrigh
by mtgx 11y ago
Not just lawyers, but entire companies want to be paid for stuff like this. See Microsoft, for instance:
> Microsoft focuses on Oracle's argument that copyright supports "non-literal" elements of software. In other words, Google can be found a copyist—even if there's no actual copying of code. The "structure, sequence, and organization" (or SSO) of software "can, in some instances, be protected by the copyright in the work." Copyright violations can be found in a software case "even when the defendant did not copy the underlying developers' code," Microsoft insists, because the defendant has copied "some other, non-literal element of the software."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/microsoft-foresees-chaos-if-google-v-oracle-result-stands/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/microsoft-foresee...
So it's not just literal "copying" (accidental or not) that must be punished/paid for, but companies or developers should be forced to pay for making "similar" APIs as well.
- deong 11y agoTo be fair, that's not an enormously crazy thing to say. If I read George R.R. Martin's work and then write the exact same story, going through sentence by sentence and changing each material word just enough to say it wasn't "copied" (e.g., "Tyrion shot the arrow through his father's heart" becomes "Tyrone fired the bolt, piercing his patriarch's breast"), I'm surely guilty of copyright infringement. I don't think SSO should qualify for this sort of protection, for a number of reasons (it has significant functional constraints on how its expressed, it's a tiny fraction of an overall creative work of software, etc.). But it's not obviously nuts to claim it should either.