Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2001 14:48:40 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@blarg.net> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: IBM suing (was: RMS Suing was [SUGGESTION] - JFS for FreeBSD) Message-ID: <3C193048.4FBDB302@mindspring.com> References: <20011213093555.76629.qmail@web21107.mail.yahoo.com> <3C187D1F.24D8E4D2@mindspring.com> <quhequdhaf.equ@localhost.localdomain>
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"Gary W. Swearingen" wrote: > Can anyone reference any actual law on "contamination" by code which > is just available to the infringer, rather than being known to be in his > hands? The closest example is the "deep reverse engineering" claim in the Microsoft vs. Stack Technologies lawsuit, where someone at Stack figured out that Windows looked for a specifically named ".BIN" file for the FS compression driver, and loaded it before everything else. It's interesting in this context, since clean room coding is still legal, and this was the only way they had to attack it: they could not successfully claim contamination through availability. In the Open Source sector, RMS made a claim against the crypto library based on (in effect) "interface copyright", making the infringing code "code built to use this interface unique to GPL'ed code, and therefore a derivative work of the GPL'ed code". The claim was withdrawn, after they wrote their own consumer of the interface to the crypto library (effectively, writing the other half of the equation themselves), making the interface exist in more than GPL'ed code, making the argument RMS put forth impossible to substantiate. I think both these cases argue against the idea that you could successfully prosecute on the basis of a publically available reference implementation existing -- one might make the same argument for "Lesstif" vs. Motif, and it's well documented (in their mailing list archives) that the Lesstif people used Motif header files and namelists from the Motif libraries to do their engineering. Now it's entirely possible for there to be nuisance lawsuits, which might even win based on a preponderance of evidence, which is manufactured through a preponderance of money. But it is unlikely in the extreme, I think, in this case, given the bad publicity of supposedly making code public as a reference implementation, and then crying foul when someone actually uses it as a reference implementation. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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