Maurice LING wrote: > As Steven mentioned -- anything you can read is copyrighted. The > difference is whether is the copyright effective or enforceable. What do > I mean by this? Without copyright, there will not be plagarism. Ask > yourself this question, can you copy William Shakespeare's MacBeth and > submit it as a literary work for a Master of Literary Arts degree? I > believe the candidate will be expelled from university. William > Shakespeare's MacBeth is still copyrighted work but not "enforceable" > because it is pre-1900's work and the author had been dead for more than > 50 years. Similarly, works in public domain are still copyrighted -- > academically, using work in public domain without attribution (giving > credits in the form of citations) is still plagarism. > > This means that everything you had read since the days of "ABC..." are > copyrighted. That includes all codes you've seen in colleges etc etc. I > am afraid that to avoid copyright altogether, as far as your work is > concerned, you might have to seclude yourself in some pacific islands > and re-discover mathematics and computer science all over again from 1 + > 1 = 2, and 2 + 1 = 3, and so on. Even so, patents will still get you at > the end. > > In copyright, there is fair use. There is no way of avoiding it totally > -- how many ways are there to write a list comprehension? > > Copyright just says attribute credits when you use someone else's work > within the limits of fair use; otherwise you might have to pay for it in > the form of a licence, subject to the copyright owner. I believe you've > done all these in college when writing your essays. > > I believe in most cases, a simple declaration like "This function is a > re-implementation (or adaptation) of that found in <some periodical's > title, year, and page number>" will suffice. > > Have you not read "The Python Cookbook", in book form or from the > website? How do you attribute credits when you are using the codes?
I'm not going to go through this point by point, but nearly everything you've said is wrong. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
