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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 05:13 AM EDT |
There is no such thing in law as intellectual property. There
is copyright, patents, trademarks, and so on, but intellectual
property is not a legal definition.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 06:39 AM EDT |
There are copyrights, patents,and trademarks.
So "intellectual property" is munged terminology, just like
"API" and "JAVA" without some qualification.
Copyright law therefore protects against unlicensed
duplication of the fixed into a medium expression of the
abstract idea.
Yet Google is not being sued, in the main, for publishing an
API specification document, but rather for what may or may
not be considered a derived work. i.e. The Harmony source
code libraries incorporated into Android's libraries; which
implement and are compatible with the abstract Java API
specification(s). However, Google's lawyer took pains to
show with their opening slides, that various source codes
may be composed from *reading* the same API specification.
So other than the obvious rangeCheck function that was
inadvetantly copied, I don't understand the nature of the
copyright violation Oracle is claiming; unless carry over
into the source code of the API specification's sequence,
structure, organisation (SSO ) does not qualify as Scenes a
faire. And yet once again, Robert Van Nest took pains to
show that various source codes of various SSO may be
composed from *reading* the same API specification.
Am I misunderstanding ??[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Steve Martin on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 07:09 AM EDT |
Copyright applies to expressions of ideas, not physical things
- it's an
intellectual property right. You're going to have trouble holding
almost
anything copyrighted in your hand as they're usually not tangible
objects.
On the contrary, according to US copyright law
(Title 17 § 102), "Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this
title, in original
works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of
expression, now known
or later developed, from which they can be perceived,
reproduced, or otherwise
communicated, either directly or with the aid of a
machine or device." (emphasis added by me) If it is not tangible, it is not
copyrightable. After all, if it is not tangible, how can one copy it? And that's
what copyright protection is all about.
--- "When I say something, I
put my name next to it." -- Isaac Jaffe, "Sports Night" [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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