4 ms·

There might be legal precedent on this issue since there used to be books of tables of logarithms published in the days before calculators and computers. The pu

by henning 17y ago

There might be legal precedent on this issue since there used to be books of tables of logarithms published in the days before calculators and computers. The publishers would place subtle errors in a few random points many digits out to prove that someone else had copied the numbers without computing the logarithms themselves. Of course IANAL.

gloob 17y ago
Forgive me my lack of insight, but I'm not entirely certain what that has to do with this particular case. What you are listing is a mechanism for copyright protection - while the numbers themselves cannot be copyrighted, the book containing them might qualify for copyright (depending on the local legal system). The question here is not about copyright, however. (Probably. Maybe.) The question here is whether it is legal to factor an arbitrary number and inform others of the results.
- delackner 17y ago
  England and the United States have decided differently (england: yes, us: no) whether to allow copyright of lists of otherwise uncopyrightable information. The long term outcome has been a thought provoking natural experiment: the United States, with no such copyright allowance, has a thriving industry of competing databases of various kinds of publicly available information. The UK has no such thriving ecosystem. Or at least this was all according to a newspaper article a few years back. For all I know they may have since seen the light and banned copyright on databases.
jrockway 17y ago
Copying the table may be illegal (although probably not; you can copy the phonebook), but referring to it while figuring out how to make a flat screwdriver unscrew a phillips-head screw is probably not. How is using a flat screwdriver to unscrew a phillips-head screw different from using your own OS on your own calculator instead of using TI's?

4 ms·

There might be legal precedent on this issue since there used to be books of tables of logarithms published in the days before calculators and computers. The pu

by henning 17y ago

gloob 17y ago
Forgive me my lack of insight, but I'm not entirely certain what that has to do with this particular case. What you are listing is a mechanism for copyright protection - while the numbers themselves cannot be copyrighted, the book containing them might qualify for copyright (depending on the local legal system). The question here is not about copyright, however. (Probably. Maybe.) The question here is whether it is legal to factor an arbitrary number and inform others of the results.
- delackner 17y ago
  England and the United States have decided differently (england: yes, us: no) whether to allow copyright of lists of otherwise uncopyrightable information. The long term outcome has been a thought provoking natural experiment: the United States, with no such copyright allowance, has a thriving industry of competing databases of various kinds of publicly available information. The UK has no such thriving ecosystem. Or at least this was all according to a newspaper article a few years back. For all I know they may have since seen the light and banned copyright on databases.
jrockway 17y ago
Copying the table may be illegal (although probably not; you can copy the phonebook), but referring to it while figuring out how to make a flat screwdriver unscrew a phillips-head screw is probably not. How is using a flat screwdriver to unscrew a phillips-head screw different from using your own OS on your own calculator instead of using TI's?