On Jan 16, 2008 3:42 AM, Tiziano De Togni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Could you please tell me if there is a real chance that CodeGear asks > money for a concrete copyright violation to someone of the FPC or > Lazarus developers? > > And in this case, how this claim could be performed?
Well, one interesting thing to note is that I do not know of a case where a small code segment was sufficient to bring a copyright infringement action, even if that code segment was a couple of hundred lines long. However, this may be due to two factors: 1) such a relatively small code segment is fairly easy to re-implement as original code; and 2) this usually reflects only a very small fraction of the entire codebase involved. Point 2 is worth commenting on. This would be the equivalent of a songwriter using a 4-note phrase from another song. US Copyright law has recognized the impracticality (and indeed, undesirability) of such a strict policy if it were to be enforced. The fact that a several-hundred-thousand line codebase has even a few hundred lines in common with another work is rather unremarkable from a legal standpoint. However, that's not to say the plaintiff couldn't bring such a suit; but filing a suit based on code fragment violations in software is a fairly new concept, and it's largely been unsuccessful. More frequently, software "infringement" suits are brought as patent claims, not copyright, specifically because of the difficulty in enforcing a copyright claim when only a small segment of code is alleged to have been copied. (Copyright infringement claims usually involve the copying of entire works, not tiny segments, and indeed the Copyright law itself was written with that idea in mind.) Copyright law is also fairly unique in that it provides for statutory damages. What this means is that the plaintiff only has to prove that an infringement occurred, they don't have to prove that they were actually damaged by that infringement. Usually, in a civil suit the plaintiff has to prove that they were actually damaged in some way, and the judgment has to reflect the actual damages incurred. As opposed to proving actual damages, US copyright law provides the plaintiff with the option of requesting an award of damages which is set by the statute itself, which is why this type of award is called "statutory damages". The range is a fairly large, and it is in the judge's (or jury's) discretion to set the actual amount, but the award has to be in the range of $750 to $30,000 per work infringed. One software program is considered one work, so it wouldn't matter is there were several instances of copyright infringement involved within the same program, there would still only be one work infringed upon and only one award of damages (using FPC as an example, CodeGear couldn't ask for (say) 30 separate damage awards if 30 units within the FPC codebase contained infringing code, they could only request one award of damages since FPC is considered one work). There is a second, higher tier of damages, if the plaintiff can prove the infringement was "willful", set at $150,000 per work. However, this is very hard to prove. "Willful" has a legal meaning in this context, it doesn't simply mean that the defendant *intended* to infringe upon the copyright, which is almost always the case anyway. An example of "willful" infringement would be a CD-pressing shop. If you burn a copy of your friend's CD, you most certainly intended to infringe the copyright. But the intent would only be considered "willful" if you burned (say) 1,000 copies with the intention of selling them (actually, even if you intended to just give them away -- profit is not required). _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
