How not to handle a licensing violation

Posted Apr 12, 2007 3:07 UTC (Thu) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: How not to handle a licensing violation by k8to
Parent article: How not to handle a licensing violation

>There's no particular problem to my thinking of starting with the GPL code and rewriting it until the original is gone.

There are multiple theories on this. The situation you propose is likely okay as a matter of law (it would probably depend on the similarity between the original and the rewritten version), and that's enough for some people. Other people get understandably put off by those words "likely" and "probably", so they only accept code that was built in a fully clean-room fashion. Most commonly one is worried about contamination from proprietary code, but contamination from GPL code would work exactly the same way.

I am pretty sure that the OpenBSD developers fall, as a rule, into the more-cautious second group.

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How not to handle a licensing violation

Posted Apr 12, 2007 17:47 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] (2 responses)

> There's no particular problem to my thinking of starting with the GPL code and rewriting it until the original is gone.

IANAL but I'm pretty certain that there is a problem! The situation is very similar to the translation of a book out of one language and into another, perhaps followed by renaming all the characters and places until no words at all of the original remain (though if there is no common script or phonetics, such as Chinese to English, that can't happen anyway). A good human-language translation often requires linguistic restructuring of the order of a paragraph and not infrequently some degree of re-invention of the plot details. (For example, what to do when something arises out of a character mis-hearing one word as another, when in the target language the mis-hearing could not arise?) Regardless of such rewriting and even re-plotting, a translation is quite definitely a derived work in law.

This is why when folks are doing reverse-engineering of proprietary stuff they tend to adopy very stringent two-team "clean-room" approaches, to make sure that nothing derivative of decompiled machine code gets copied into the new project. This is of course a paranoid approach necessary where you know that the original author's lawyers are definitely out to get you if they can.

How not to handle a licensing violation

Posted Apr 13, 2007 16:39 UTC (Fri) by notamisfit (guest, #40886) [Link] (1 responses)

Just out of curiosity, does this mean that the copyright to GNU Emacs is still in the hands of James Gosling?

How not to handle a licensing violation

Posted Sep 3, 2008 20:57 UTC (Wed) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

There is no "the" copyright to GNU Emacs; it's possible that James Gosling could hold some copyright to GNU Emacs. However, I believe that any court would settle a legal battle by evoking estoppel; you can't let someone publicly put that much work into a product and then after 20 years contest their right to do so. For example, Kevin McClory who worked on a film script with Ian Fleming claimed that the cinematic James Bond was a derivative work of his work, but a court said that you can't wait until the DVDs of movies made in the 60s out to press a copyright claim.