Date: 13 Dec 2001 17:00:40 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: IBM suing (was: RMS Suing was [SUGGESTION] - JFS for FreeBSD) Message-ID: <k6y9k6aa4n.9k6@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <3C193048.4FBDB302@mindspring.com> References: <20011213093555.76629.qmail@web21107.mail.yahoo.com> <3C187D1F.24D8E4D2@mindspring.com> <quhequdhaf.equ@localhost.localdomain> <3C193048.4FBDB302@mindspring.com>
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Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> writes: > "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? ... > 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. Thanks for the info. I'll check into the Stack thing; I didn't understand the applicability, but it sounds interesting anyway. I'm afraid that if this issue is ever litigated, the courts will, as is their custom, lean heavily towards the rights of the copyright owner and be very broad in their consideration of what a derivative is. Seems they push it way further than they should in the book and movie fields. Fortunately, with much less money involved, they might do the Right Thing. > 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. Funny. I might make some fair use of that one. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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