"Roy T. Fielding" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 08/01/2005 06:02:34 PM:
> On Aug 1, 2005, at 10:22 AM, Justin Erenkrantz wrote: > > > Furthermore, my understanding of copyright law is that you can't be > > tainted by 'reading' source code years ago and then writing a version > > independently. (In fact, the examples I've heard of are 'minutes > > apart' is legally acceptable.) Of course, patent infringement occurs > > whether you've read the code or not. FWIW, our compiler languages > > class here at UC Irvine teaches Java internals - therefore, they'd all > > be 'tainted' under this definition - which isn't actually the case. > > I agree with Justin. BTW, the two sides of the coin are copyright > and trade secret law. Copyright does not apply to things that you > may have learned in the past. I think that there is a misunderstanding as to what the requirements are for a copyright claim. If we want to get into a more complete discussion, the legal-discuss list would be more appropriate, but in short, the above posts are incorrect. Merely reading another work (in the past, even years in the past) is sufficient as a basis for a copyright claim. Basically, to successfully assert a copyright claim, you need to show 2 things . . . Access and Substantial Similarity. Access does not need to be concurrent. There have been cases where the access was MANY, MANY years prior. Jeff Staff Counsel, IBM Corporation (914)766-1757 (tie)8-826 (fax) -8160 (notes) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (internet) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (web) http://www.beff.net/
