On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 9:46 PM, Lars Buitinck <[email protected]> wrote: > 2012/11/14 David Warde-Farley <[email protected]>: >> The legal definition of "derivative work" can make things dicey in these >> situations. > > Indeed. If you so much as look at the code while reimplementing it, > that's strictly speaking a copyright infringement, since it's the code > that's copyrighted.
That's questionable as a statement of fact, I think. There are a variety of judgements that a court would need to make to determine if something infringed, and I don't think that just looking at the original code is a determinative one, though it may certainly contribute. The possible sets of judgements vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and none of them are well-precedented for software. I don't mean to nitpick; I know you aren't a lawyer, and neither am I, but I don't want people to walk away from this discussion thinking that they can sue for copyright infringement if someone so much as looks at their code while reimplementing their algorithm. All that said, since we are on the other side, it may behoove us to treat it as if it were true. What *is* widely accepted as a legal practice, at least in the US, is to split up into two teams: one that reads the original software and writes documentation and test cases and one that takes the documentation and tests to write the new implementation. -- Robert Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single web console. Get in-depth insight into apps, servers, databases, vmware, SAP, cloud infrastructure, etc. Download 30-day Free Trial. Pricing starts from $795 for 25 servers or applications! http://p.sf.net/sfu/zoho_dev2dev_nov _______________________________________________ Scikit-learn-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scikit-learn-general
