On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 09:22:21PM +0530, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: > BTW, have you read Lexmark vs. Static Control?
the copyright-infringement part of that suit related to a really tiny program that had to operate in constrained circumstances (i believe 50 bytes long or so). to the defence that copying the program as is was the only reasonable way to express the algorigthm - which was not patented, apparently - may work. for any reasonably larger program such an argument is not likely to be as effective. the whole domain of software copyright is a total mess. as greg aharonian has been arguing for years, courts and statutes for software copyright have been incredibly confused (the naive assumption that copyright infringement == literal copying is wrong, as sometimes you can infringe without any literal copying and other times you don't infringe despite literal copying). of cource, greg's solution is that patents (only) are the means of protection for software authorship rights, and many may not agree with that. -rishab
