Tue, 21 Sep 2010 16:21:38 +0200, klickverbot wrote: > On 9/21/10 3:55 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: >> People seem to think that an accusation is proof. If someone says you >> stole their code, because you read it, it's not always true. It's just >> much easier to prove you didn't steal it if you didn't read it. > > And how exactly are you going to prove that you didn't read it?
The western court system AFAIK operates with the presumption of innocence. I've seen some cases against GPLed software. The commercial company used freely licensed code without releasing their own associated code in any form. Although they tried to convince it's a contract violation and GPL is an invalid contract anyways, the judges decided to apply the copyright law in these cases and the GPL project won the case. What kind of evidence they used against the infringing application? Well, the offending software only came in binary form and the original was publicly available as source code. The binaries contained function signatures, function body code, and strings in exactly the same form as the GPLed software when compiled with some mainstream copiler (MSVC++, GCC). The shady company later tried to obfuscate these signatures in updated versions but the experts showed how the code is essentially the same after removing the obfuscation (same calling sequences, same logic paths etc.) In my opinion it's difficult to find phony evidence against a software developer in Europe, because associations like EFF may assist you, software isn't patentable, and very small pieces of code aren't even copyrightable. It's quite unlikely that given two nontrivial application they share many function signatures or strings. An innocent software developer won't start obfuscating his sources when some commercial entity starts threatening.
