On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 7:55 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: > I'll stand by my original statement. > > I'm not going to get into the Pixar case since it doesn't apply here.
I did not say it applied to the Visual studio generated cruft... I merely commented on the blanket assertion that 'computer generated => no copyright' > > The Bison manual may have license conditions on what can be done with the > generated artifact, but I suggest that is not about copyrightable subject > matter in the artifact. Actually it is. The only claim they could legally have _is_ on the generated bit that are substantial piece of code copied from template they provide, namely in the case of a bison generated parser the whole parser skeleton needed to exploit the generated state-graph. the whole paragraph is about the copyright disposition of these bits. and in the case of bison they explicitly grant you a license to use these bits in the 'normal' use case... my point being that the existence of that paragraph also disprove the assertion that 'computer generated => no copyright' You could write a program that print itself... the mere fact that it print itself does not mean you lose the copyright on your program... That being said, I do think you are on the clear with the Visual Studio generated cruft... but not merely because there is 'computer generation' involved. Norbert