Re: [O/T 4 cla] Re: GPL and "free" software

[les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell)]

In article <7grvur$li2$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
Robert Dewar  <robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com> 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.

No, it wasn't a trick question.  Obviously you could encode the
original work in some other representation and it would still be
covered.  However, the concept of a 'diff' is exactly the opposite.
It conveys, by definition, the parts that were not in the original.

>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.

If the only part copied is the patch, how can anything else be
involved?  A normal patch file does contain bits of the surrounding
context; even in the ed form there will be original content as parts
of some lines.  I'd think this would be 'fair use' particularly
since the recipient must already have his own copy of the original
to use the patch.  However that objection could be eliminated by
a different patch format that used character offsets with the lines
to anchor the changes instead of containing any of the original content.

>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.

Like they say, if the two lawyers can't agree, how are the jurors
supposed to...

  Les Mikesell
     les@mcs.com