2 ms·

> Playing a movie for a few friends who visits is fine, but start to demand tickets and suddenly it will look like a cinema which is not fine. Interesting anal

> Playing a movie for a few friends who visits is fine, but start to demand tickets and suddenly it will look like a cinema which is not fine. Interesting analogy. "Ripping" something off an only using it for your personal project sounds like the "playing a movie for a few friends". Doing so for the benefit of corporation that then has thousands of daily visitors sounds like the "movie cinema" example. Though, in both cases it was an individual googling and finding how to implement a specific function. "fair use" in copyright is pretty specific in that it refers to things like "you can play portions of a clip in order to comment on it." Or as another example, you can use clips/portions for the purposes of a review commentary. "Form and function" is perhaps a very important crux here. Some things you can only do a certain way. For example, quick-sort, there are is only really one way to implement quick sort (or otherwise it is not at all quick sort!). Personally I feel the copyright line is higher than a function, the copyright is on the collection of functions who together create a specific software. The individual functions IMHO are as copyright'able as-is a cog on a bike cassette, or the chain on a motorcycle.

belorn 4y ago
I think there are quite few things in programming that can only be implemented one way. I see it as similar to music in that almost every song have notes going up or down the scale. Obviously there can't be that many variations, but then the important distinctions is often in the details. Applying copyright on a single function is like applying copyright on a single riff. Sometimes the legal system will accept it, but it should be the exception rather than the norm. Fair use seem to had a change in scope. Historically it seems to be mostly about things like "play a clip in order to comment on it.", but now we have things like google making a copy of all books ever written in order for people to search through them. Similar arguments has been made over copying news articles from news sites in order to put a portion of it in search results. A stack overflow-like search engine that trawled proprietary code bases would likely be sued, but in theory they could argue fair use just like google.

belorn 4y ago

I think there are quite few things in programming that can only be implemented one way. I see it as similar to music in that almost every song have notes going up or down the scale. Obviously there can't be that many variations, but then the important distinctions is often in the details. Applying copyright on a single function is like applying copyright on a single riff. Sometimes the legal system will accept it, but it should be the exception rather than the norm. Fair use seem to had a change in scope. Historically it seems to be mostly about things like "play a clip in order to comment on it.", but now we have things like google making a copy of all books ever written in order for people to search through them. Similar arguments has been made over copying news articles from news sites in order to put a portion of it in search results. A stack overflow-like search engine that trawled proprietary code bases would likely be sued, but in theory they could argue fair use just like google.