[T]he Supreme Court ruled that a mere collection of facts can't be
copyrighted.
Would the Linux people, then, be able to assert
that their C code is merely programmable facts which generates certain
(MD5|MD4|SHA1|etc) hashes? Chew on that one, SCO.
A number of people pointed out that code is excluded from the bill, but they miss the point. The court ruled that they can't be copyrighted prior to the proposed bill. The bill has nothing to do with it. grub's point is that copyright law would, in this case, not extend to code. But that's still a tough sell.
C code is no more a set of facts than poetry is a set of facts. C does more than generate hashes, for one thing (at least the Linux code does more than that, else there'd be a lot of coders who've wasted a lot of time). Code is a set of instructions, which are together part of a process. It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book. A collection of, say, reserved names in Java may be merely a collection of facts; an original creation is not. It's also inventive, in the patentable sense (`look-and-feel' patents, of course, raise some big controversy). But it's not simply a collection of facts.
It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book.
To expand on this a bit more, when writing any non-trivial program (basically, anything more complex than PRINT "HELLO WORLD") the programmer engages in exactly the same creative process as the author of any novel. An author makes a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether his protagonist shoots to kill or shoots to wound the antagonist in chapter 3. And he decides if it's worthwhile
"Be there. Aloha."
-- Steve McGarret, _Hawaii Five-Oh_
Who owns the facts? (Score:4, Interesting)
[T]he Supreme Court ruled that a mere collection of facts can't be copyrighted.
Would the Linux people, then, be able to assert that their C code is merely programmable facts which generates certain (MD5|MD4|SHA1|etc) hashes? Chew on that one, SCO.
Re:Who owns the facts? (Score:5, Informative)
C code is no more a set of facts than poetry is a set of facts. C does more than generate hashes, for one thing (at least the Linux code does more than that, else there'd be a lot of coders who've wasted a lot of time). Code is a set of instructions, which are together part of a process. It's creative, in the sense that you put together programs in a language the same way a writer puts together a book. A collection of, say, reserved names in Java may be merely a collection of facts; an original creation is not. It's also inventive, in the patentable sense (`look-and-feel' patents, of course, raise some big controversy). But it's not simply a collection of facts.
exactly (Score:2)
An apple is green : is this true?
A computer program is obviously not a fact.
perl -e 'print "Hello\n";' : is this true?
Re:exactly (Score:2)
Check for yourself (Score:3, Funny)
{
print "True!\n";
}
else
{
print "False!\n";
}
Re:Check for yourself (Score:1)
Reading a bad definition of what it is to be a fact on slashdot is not a legal argument.
Re:Who owns the facts? (Score:1)
To expand on this a bit more, when writing any non-trivial program (basically, anything more complex than PRINT "HELLO WORLD") the programmer engages in exactly the same creative process as the author of any novel. An author makes a more-or-less arbitrary decision as to whether his protagonist shoots to kill or shoots to wound the antagonist in chapter 3. And he decides if it's worthwhile