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How Not to Get Snookered by Claims of "Proof" of Copyright Infringement

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 3 comments
Groklaw
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I guess you heard that Florian Mueller is at it again. He made strong claims of a smoking gun regarding alleged copyright infringement of Oracle files by Google. Well, in the cold light of day, some of the media who printed it without fact checking are now awakening to the news that the news wasn't as reliable or unchallengeable as they assumed. You'll find corrections now, notably from Ed Burnette at ZDNet, who is a programmer-journalist, and by Paul Ryan at ars technica. That is what journalists are supposed to do, if they see wrong information. It's part of the ethics of being a good journalist, and the other part is to issue corrections when the mistake is your own. To their credit, many journalists have now corrected what they wrote initially.

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Comments (3)

Copyright law really isn't all that mysterious.

You are not allowed to copy or distribute protectable content without the permission of the copyright holder except for a deliniated group of exceptions know collectively as fair use.

The problems with FM's contentions come in 2 places, if one assumes that the copied code really is there:

1. Protectable --

Not all code is protectable. Stuff that has been placed in the public domain remains there forever and thus can never be protectable. Stuff that does not incorporate a requisite element of creativity -- ie, not dictated by the requirements of hardware, standard, etc -- is not protectable. etc.

2. Copied or distributed without the permission of the copyright holder. You can put "PROPRIETARY" and "CONFIDENTIAL" on every line of code you write, but that doesn't make it so. If you've been given permission to use it, you've been given permission. A license is a formalized form of permission.



I haven't yet read Groklaw's take on it, but the second post on ZDNet (which I linked in the Engadget thread) convinced me that it is very probable that there is no infringement.

The first response on ZDNet, however, was unconvincing (saying "but they're unit tests" doesn't disqualify them from being copyrightable, however, the second article clears things up further by noting that Oracle's original license permitted their use as unit tests).
@KS -

Yup, it would seem that way.

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