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Judge Alsup is very thorough and wants no successful appeal of his decision | 697 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Judge Alsup is very thorough and wants no successful appeal of his decision
Authored by: PJ on Tuesday, May 08 2012 @ 09:19 PM EDT
Not thin air. They pulled it from a case,
Whelan, where it had nothing to do with
APIs.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Judge Alsup is very thorough and wants no successful appeal of his decision
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 08 2012 @ 10:13 PM EDT

I don't think I engaged in a straw man argument, and it certainly wasn't intentional if I did.

Perhaps what is integral that I left out is that in a legal context, when referring to "computer programs" (whatever those are, legally speaking) structure, sequence, and organization are all synonyms, per the judge who coined the phrase for legal usage 26 years ago. At the time, structured programming was the dominant paradigm, and he borrowed then-current words which would have made perfect sense to the computer scientists who testified at the trial as expert witnesses. If I'm not mistaken (I haven't checked) those expert witnesses would have been the source of the phrase (even if they didn't use the words together in that way).

My point being that all of the elements of SSO are part of the computing vocabulary (at least in my experience). The underlying concept, that of identifiable but non-literal elements is fundamental to software design and development. Thumbing through the table of contents of an old copy of Code Complete on my shelf, I can see all of the concepts represented, in practically the same words.

Thus I take issue with the idea that any one of structure, sequence, or organization (since they are interchangeable) is (or was) not part of the computing vocabulary with approximately the same meaning as it is used in the legal vocabulary at the time the phrase was adopted. That the legal vocabulary takes much longer to evolve than the technical vocabulary is not a surprise, but the legal vocabulary is based on the historical technical vocabulary, so it should not be conceptually foreign to those in the field.

As for the complaint that the legal process has prevented standard practice, technical knowledge, and commonsense in this field from overruling the lawyers, that is its proper role. Industry standard practices (in any industry) are not necessarily legal or wise (in fact you can incur liability in negligence for following standard industry practice if that practice is found itself to be negligent) and the interplay between the law, industry, and science is all part of the political process of us figuring out how to live together without killing each other.

If the technical folks do their jobs educating the lawyers, judges, and politicians then this perceived problem will go away, although probably not fast enough for those used to the torrid pace of change in technical fields. I don't think that the technical explanations given in the copyright phase of this trial were particularly helpful. As a friend of mine with a Ph.D. in combinatorics once told me "if I can't explain my thesis to a bright 13-year-old in less than 15 minutes, I have no business defending it." By this standard I'm not sure that the experts had any business on the stand. In that regard I do agree with the original poster: maybe the judge should have availed himself of a neutral technical expert. On the other hand, this judge has a math degree and so is likely quite capable of understanding the tech if it is explained well.

I think your reference to cargo cult science is a bit unfair: the lawyers and judges use the phrase as kind of shorthand, much like Feynman (whom I admire greatly) would have used the words electron or photon, or the phrase particle-wave when speaking both with other physicists and with non-physicists.

Well, that turned into a much longer post than I had intended. Have fun picking it apart. ;)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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