Comment by pmm98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmm98 | Hacker News Reader

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That you think “copyright purity” is the issue to litigate points out that you’re not very clueful either, I’m afraid. If I quit Google and write a clone search engine using none of their code but all of their technical architecture, in no way does that interact with Google’s copyrights. At all. You can’t copyright an indexing strategy nor a software architecture. You can, however, copyright a Visio diagram of the architecture. That’s a different thing.

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.

Clean room design is a whole thing that people do, because of copyright. Maybe they don’t need to do that. If you want to quit the search team at Google and make your own search company, I’m not against that, but you should expect scrutiny like the kind Levandowski had.

Clean room design of software has absolutely nothing to do with copyright because software concepts cannot be copyrighted. I would encourage you to study these legal concepts further before you debate them, because you’re coming off quite uninformed. Copyright has a specific purpose and specific limits. Studying a competitive software product and cloning it (even non clean room) is, again, not a copyright violation unless you’re literally pulling code from the competitive product. Nearly all clean rooms are to avoid patents and specific implementation thereof in the software space. This is different when it comes to other fields, so I get the confusion.

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.

No, it is directly to avoid copyright. It doesn’t protect against patents. Trademarks are irrelevant. What other form of IP is there?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Wikipedia is speaking to a broader application of copyright than software. It’s also targeting an international audience, where this varies.

Again, you’re coming off uninformed here and relying on Wikipedia (which doesn’t speak to that context) isn’t really helping.

I’m linking Wikipedia to help you out.

Clean room design doesn’t protect you from patents. That’s not how patents work, simple as that.

To help me out? I’m patiently trying to explain to you that your mental model of copyright and particularly how it interacts with software is fundamentally flawed. I’m handwaving a lot of complexity when I refer to patents (and why clean rooms are important when dealing with implementation) because I’m not discussing patent law with you. I’m specifically responding to you saying “I didn’t clone a prior employer because copyrights.” That’s just factually wrong. Pulling me into “aha, but what about patents?” in a deep thread is extremely tiring.

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”.

And here I thought you were the one pulling me into this tangent.

If you have the time later I’d love to hear how you can legally infringe on a patent with clean room design.

While we’re on this tangent, you might want to check out the Zenimax vs. Oculus copyright judgement. Which I think is bullshit, but that’s the sort of thing I was worried about.

Clean room design is about wholesale copying of code. If you copied the APIs and architecture and wrote the code differently there would be nothing wrong as SCOTUS just ruled.

You’re stretching SCOTUS’s ruling about API’s farther than it goes.

Regarding this part of your comment:

> 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.

Fair use only applies to copyrighted materials. The parent poster is pointing out (correctly but maybe not written the best way) that it isn’t a copyright issue unless something like code was actually copied, and thus fair use doesn’t apply. Abstract things like ideas, architecture and design don’t have copyright protection.

> The parent poster is pointing out (correctly but maybe not written the best way) that it isn’t a copyright issue unless something like code was actually copied,

And this is in fact false. See https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=191354689554...

That was an expert witness claiming “non literal copying” is a copyright violation, but that doesn’t make it so. As far as I can tell the trial concluded with a finding that someone violated an NDA but no copyright violation. Am I misreading that ?

The trial had a $50 million award for the copyright violation.

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