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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: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 09:24 AM EDT
So, this is what your argument sounds like to me: "I don't like the
technical legal term (that lawyers didn't make up, but rather adopted from what
the computer scientists told them 25 years ago) used to represent the
non-literal but copyright protectable elements of software because the lawyers
don't use the words in the same way as computer scientists use them
today."

That argument is just as valid as saying that computer scientists shouldn't use
the word "inheritance" when talking to each other about the structure
of objects because they use it in a way that, while related, doesn't mean the
same thing as it does when used by non-computer scientists. Maybe we should
also have physicists stop using the phrase "particle-wave" since it
doesn't mean the same thing as either particle or wave and they can't show me
one?

I think that you have presented your own straw man by using an uncountable noun
phrase in the singular. I'll show you "an SSO" in a piece of software
as soon as you show me "a water" in the ocean. You may as well argue
that the ocean isn't made up primarily of water and we shouldn't use the word
water when talking about large bodies of water because the ocean doesn't contain
"a water". The only place I've ever seen SSO used as a countable noun
in this way is on groklaw (and its an incorrect usage).

If you really don't like the vocabulary that much you should become a
professional expert, start testifying in cases, and teach the right appeals
judges the phrase that you think is correct so that the legal profession can
adopt it. in 25 years someone else will come along with the same complaint that
you have and insist that whatever shorthand you've come up with is wrong and
shouldn't be used because they don't like it.

You are right in one sense, an API does reflect the abstracted structure of
object oriented code, although it certainly doesn't capture all of it.

Maybe this will help: whenever you see the phrase SSO in a legal context remind
yourself that it is a legal term of art (and understand what it means in that
context) and not a term of art in computer science. You might even want to
thing of it as a linguistic loan word (or even a false friend, although that's
not quite an apt analogy). That should prevent any confusion.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • particle-wave - Authored by: Wol on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 10:57 AM EDT
    • particle-wave - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 01:41 PM EDT
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