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From: Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com>
Subject: Re: [O/T 4 cla] Re: GPL and "free" software
Date: 1999/05/06
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In article <7gr768$kqe$1@Jupiter.mcs.net>,
  les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell) wrote:

> There are lawsuits over nearly everything.  Is there any court
> decision that states that something you write is covered by
> someone else's copyright when it contains none of the other
> work?

If by "contains none of the other work" you mean contains no literal
characters copied from the other work, then of course the answer
is yes.

The process for evaluation of copyright violation involves looking
for protected elements at successive levels of abstraction. It is
pretty clear to me that this abstraction process in the case of
a patch file will necessarily involve looking at the combined work.

Note that software copright is definitely NOT simply a matter of
comparing two texts, it is a far more complicated process, as anyone
who has been involved in such cases is aware.

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