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>And, like John, I consider the notion of 'non-literal copying' to be pretty ridiculous. What about translating from one language to another, like in Carmack's
by efraim 10y ago
>And, like John, I consider the notion of 'non-literal copying' to be pretty ridiculous.
What about translating from one language to another, like in Carmack's book example? You can't literally copy from c++ to Java, but it can look pretty similar. Would that be considered copyright infringement?
- dragonwriter 10y agoI'm actually currently involved in non-literal copying of a very old C code base into Python (legally, independent of whether that's protected or not, as it's GPLv2 and the result will be as well), and the code doeant much look the same (and wouldn't even if I was copying it into C in a more modern style.) There's certainly a point where you are just duplicating unprotected function rather than making a copy dependent on the expression of that function in the original, and that's a tricky legal line with software, but non-literal copying is certainly a thing.