4 ms·

Perhaps that’s an edge case not well covered? Is my copyrighted English work not covered if someone translates it to another language?

• jcranmer 7y ago
  Translation is one of the canonical examples of derivatives works [1], and one of the rights implied by copyright is the right to control the production of derivative works. The question of rewriting a library in a different programming language has never been litigated, to my knowledge, so there's no precedent as to whether or not it would violate copyright. The customary practice is to assume that the code produced by anyone who has seen the original source code would qualify as a derivative work, and therefore to rely on a clean-room implementation, where one group inspects the source code and builds a spec that a second group uses to implement the replacement. In the absence of legal precedent, the customary practice tends to be accorded legal preference, so it's reasonably likely that a court would rule that somebody who looks at a C implementation and produces a Java implementation without any intermediaries would constitute a derivative work and therefore be in violation of copyright if not properly authorized by the copyright owner. [1] It's literally the first example given in the US law.