> You still are saying the intern is wrong, which isn’t good.
That’s a good thing. That’s what happens when you have integrity. There is no reason to change his position on the subject of ex-employees making clones of the product.
That’s a good thing. That’s what happens when you have integrity. There is no reason to change his position on the subject of ex-employees making clones of the product.
Obviously I completely agree with this in a vacuum, but you seem to imply that that is what happened in this case. It was pretty clear from all the emails posted, assuming they were materially unaltered, that this isn’t what happened here. So your comment seems like a bit of a non sequitur, unless you’re saying that is what happened here?
A lot of people are very unclueful about this, especially young people, and maybe Mr. Masad could have had a gentler touch. But for the blogger to have cloned the product or part of it without (pinky swear!) actually taking any IP from the employer, that might in fact be legally true, but it’s a walk across a tightrope.
This also applies to your nod toward “a novel fair use argument” in a sibling comment. Fair use has absolutely nothing to do with this or any hypothetical like it. You may as well have cited bird law.
Copyright isn’t the blanket IP concept people think would cover most disputes. These types of cases get into trade dress, patent law, and other legal concepts. The fundamental limits of copyright are why software techniques are patented in the first place and one reason among many why you sign assignment when you join a company.
IANAL and my comment is U.S. biased. At least in the U.S., the fixed and tangible aspects of copyright are bite-sized enough to understand without a J.D. Given how murky this entire field is when it comes to IP, it’s extremely important to understand these concepts for even a line engineer, as well.
Theft of intellectual property in the case you cited also barely touches copyright. Put another way, copyright status of the property in question is largely immaterial to securing a conviction on the allegation.
Again, you’re coming off uninformed here and relying on Wikipedia (which doesn’t speak to that context) isn’t really helping.
Clean room design doesn’t protect you from patents. That’s not how patents work, simple as that.
I know how patents work. I hold 15 and I’ve defended two at trial. I’m tapping out here, since you’re simply competing with me to be less wrong the deeper this goes, and I’ve rapidly run out of patience to have intellectual property law explained to me by someone who doesn’t understand the fundamental purpose nor qualifications of copyright, and thinks it and fair use doctrine has any bearing on “I built a clone of Facebook”.
If you have the time later I’d love to hear how you can legally infringe on a patent with clean room design.
> Fair use has absolutely nothing to do with this or any hypothetical like it.
Yes, it does. The commercial effect of the usage is a factor in determining fair use, and that might distinguish a “show and tell” project from a “production-ready” OSS project.
And this is in fact false. See https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=191354689554...
There’s nothing here that says he’s stolen code or any IP. The CEO doesn’t even claim that he’s stolen real IP. Everything that’s similar is public knowledge and the burden of proof is to point out what’s been stolen.
Which the CEO could! Because the work was open sourced. So he could reply and say, “hey, you implemented this part in a way that is in code you worked on. It’s also a pretty atypical solution to this problem, so it seems reasonable that you took that from us.”
He doesn’t.
Instead, he gets insecure that a kid implemented a similar product in a couple days and decides to rail on him, then offer a half-apology well after it has blown up.
Taking the analogy of the punch/stab example from one of the cousin comments above, it would be really strange for people to believe that because you apologized for retaliating the original act of getting punched was blameless.
Of course the analogy of physical violence is more explicit, less vague, less nuanced than the context of IP. If he wants to explain/assert his moral/philosophical ideas on IP, then it should be done separately in a more nuanced, detailed manner than what he's been doing all this while, which is acting out in retaliation of a seemingly small threat.
This also shows insecurity/weakness. He could have acted as/been the bigger person but gave up on it on every turn.