Hacker News Reader

Comment by indolering | Hacker News Reader

Nope, it's not a violation of copyright.

Nope, it's too wishy-washy for you to judge the potential for violation in a forum post. The 4 criteria have to be interpreted with respect to the situation at hand, and hypotheticals are almost impossible to interpret rationally.

Republishing single sentences has previously been found to be a copyright violation, and copyright has been granted on as few as three notes. On the other hand (to pick a recent example), 50 Shades of Grey, originally written as a Twilight fan-fiction (derivative by definition) was never pursued for copyright violation (AFAIK).

Copyright law apparently makes an explicit exception for translations. (i.e. translations are subject to copyright despite usually sharing literally no wording with the original.)

It isn't clear to me whether that only covers works in a foreign language that claim to be translations of some other work, or whether it would apply to any foreign-language work that duplicates the plot of an earlier copyrighted work.

The thing to remember with copyright is it covers copying. If you read a book and rewrite it in another language you didn't copy it, you copied the ideas, perhaps, but copyright covers expression and not ideas.

Creating a translation of a work is a derivative work itself. This applies to porting software from C++ to Java as well as translating of Harry Potter to French.

Re-writing a story and translation are different things entirely.

If I describe at an abstracted level the working of a C++ program to you and you implement it in Java then you have not copied the work, nor even created a derivative, ergo clean-room implementation being a thing.

Like I said, the copyright law makes an explicit exception for "translations". Copyright also covers translations, despite the fact that they share none of the "expression" of the original.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com