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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

> Are you laundering 5 lines of code? Probably fair use.

The amount of copying does not matter for a copyright claim. If you copy a single character from a codebase that could could get nowhere but there, and lawyers could prove it, that could go to court. This is a hypothetical but this is entirely possible. There have been copyright cases fought over single sentences especially in the music industry.

> Are you trying to launder, or is it unintentional?

I'm not a lawyer but in the US, Copyright is a strict liability statute which means intent does not matter.

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>> Are you laundering 5 lines of code? Probably fair use.

>The amount of copying does not matter for a copyright claim.

This is incorrect. The amount of material used is the third factor in a fair use test. There are other ways it comes up as well (e.g. damage calculations).

>> Are you trying to launder, or is it unintentional?

> I'm not a lawyer but in the US, Copyright is a strict liability statute which means intent does not matter.

In this context, this is incorrect as well. People seem to be misinterpreting laws pretty badly, so instead of explaining how to apply here, I'll give a simpler, analogous context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...

In this context, it depends on a lot of things, such as direct versus contributory infringement. This would likely be a contributory infringement case, where intent is almost a requirement. https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-is-contr...

Keep in mind these are all factors. They matter, so they'll help swing a case one way or the other, but they're not something you can bank on in isolation. That's what will make for interesting case law.

> This is incorrect. The amount of material used is the third factor in a fair use test. There are other ways it comes up as well (e.g. damage calculations).

The 3rd factor of the fair use test deals with how substantial the copied material is in relation to the entire work. You can make a copy of 100% of the original work and have it still be fair use while in another situation copying 0.002% of an original work would not be fair use. The measurable amount (bytes, seconds, square inches) you are copying does not matter here. Instead the "importance" of what you are copying to your criticism is being defined in this prong.

For instance:

I am a movie buff and:

1. Make a copy of the entire movie of Citizen Kane 2. Remove the audio and replace it with a commentary track going over every framing/camera trick through the movie 3. Upload this to an educational youtube channel that teaches viewers how to shoot a movie

I would likely be allowed to use fair use as a defense to a copyright claim. Here, if an expert could say all 100% of Citizen Kane's film, contained relevant film techniques that I was actively commenting on, I would have copied the correct amount for my usage.

If I instead owned a movie review channel and I said "Citizen Kane is my favorite movie" and I displayed the entire movie after that I would likely not be using an appropriate amount of the film.

It's also important to note that fair use is a very narrow defense that covers a very limited subset of uses. It is not a generally applicable, or even a guideline, for how to skirt around copyrights.

There are plenty of errors in this, and you're confusing the four prongs, but I'll run with it for now, since it's good enough.

If I am doing code autocomplete, and copying three lines out of your program, those three lines are exceptionally unlikely to be "substantial ... in relation to the entire work."

Where you're confused is lots of places, but the biggest one is you're mixing up the prongs. Most of the reason your Citizen Kane example might work (it probably wouldn't) is Factor #1, character of use. Commentary and education are favorable.

I can come up with examples where 0.002% of an original work would not be okay, but they're pretty contrived.

For your benefit, a random link: https://guides.lib.utexas.edu/fairuse/fourfactor

Size definitely matters. It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but a factor.

The whole reply I post here is made from letters that I copied out of a Harry Potter PDF.

Clearly that's not how copyright works.

I think you missed the part where he states:

> that could could[sic] get nowhere but there, and lawyers could prove it

Also, the letters in this case are not representative of the creative work itself. If you used the title font to write your post (hypothetically, I know HN does not allow this), you'd be in bad water already.

I could copy a whole sentence from the book and it would not matter at all. Or even 5 lines like the parent post said.

>....you'd be in bad water already.

Not true either, writing my message in harry potter font would do absolutely nothing. the internet is full of images which use these or similar looking fonts. Its called fan art or whatever, copyright laws are not applicable to this.

Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22440944

Exactly zero real-world situations will have no "substantial similarity" (that's the legal requirement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity ) except for a single character.

Please explain how it "is entirely possible".

Bear in mind that there must be creativity in that choice of character to qualify for copyright protection. If only one character is correct, there's no creativity.

A sentence in a song has far more discretion for creativity than a single character in a software program.

As best as I can tell, you would need to construct some sort of super-APL where "a single character" had significantly more information content than any Unicode glyph, to exceed any de minimis standard applied to a programming language.

(Think Prince's "Love Symbol".)

> that could go to court

I think you mean "that could be found infringing." Going to court is trivial, even if there is no infringement.

> As best as I can tell, you would need to construct some sort of super-APL where "a single character" had significantly more information content than any Unicode glyph, to exceed any de minimis standard applied to a programming language.

This used to be something cartographers did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

Even if you didn't have the street's name, if you copied the road on the map (no words, just the shape) they would know you stole their IP. I do not think there is literally a character that would satisfy this condition. The point of what I was saying was the "size" of the copying does not matter at all.

The Substantial Similarity is explicitly about this phenomenon. For something to be substantially similar, from a software perspective, you could hypothetically see the modules and data structures contain roughly the same data types and that the flow of logic is the same. You could also point to a function and say "these are the same variable names". Substantial similarity is not the only component of a legal analysis of a copyright claim. Another important component of copyright is if someone had access to the material. If I had code on my laptop that I showed to no one, uploaded nowhere, and at some point I find another developer who is doing some code that is character for character identical to my work, I likely cannot do anything.

The law is complex here, I am not a lawyer, but I think the important component here: The length of copying is not a factor at all. If for some reason your algorithm requires `magic_code.seed(20154)` and your code does this by doing `magic_code.seed(ord('人'))` and you find someone else doing the same thing you'd definitely want to investigate what's going on there.

The entire copyright doctrine is created to help protect the creativity of an author. If there is something creative in your code that is copied, you likely have a copyright claim you could argue.

Your scenario was "If you copy a single character from a codebase that could could get nowhere but there". It was that "entirely possible" scenario I questioned.

Not "roughly the same data types", "same variable names", "magic_code.seed(20154)", etc. I have no question with those. Those are enough characters that they may contain creative - and thus copyrightable - content.

That is, I question your assertion that 'the "size" of the copying does not matter at all' by asking you to come up with an entirely possible scenario for why there is no de minimis case in software, even down to a single character, when there is in every other area of copyright.

BTW, the WP page you pointed to notes that "Trap streets are not copyrightable under the federal law of the United States." Thus, "stole their IP" has no meaning - they have no copyright, trademark, patent, etc.

> I question your assertion that 'the "size" of the copying does not matter at all' by asking you to come up with an entirely possible scenario for why there is no de minimis case in software, even down to a single character, when there is in every other area of copyright.

Where in copyright law for any area is there an established minimum "length"? I've never heard this nor heard lawyers claim of such a thing.

I never made that claim. I even posited a "super-APL" where a single character was enough to contain the creativity which is a prerequisite for copyright protection. Such a language does not exist, and I don't think it ever could, but there is a slightly-greater-than-0% chance that it could happen.

OTOH, your original context for an "entirely possible" scenario at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27730596 was "The amount of copying does not matter for a copyright claim", which implied your scenario was not that hypothetical example I posited.

(A 1E-20 probability * maximum expected lawsuit payment with successful lawsuit = don't worry about that scenario.)

We do know that the courts have decided many cases are de minimis non-infringing use of materials otherwise under copyright.

Do you think there is no acceptable de minimis argument in software? If not, why is software somehow special compared to other areas of copyright?

A "de minimis analysis ... usually focuses on the amount of the copyrighted material that is copied." - quoting http://patentarcade.com/2020/04/nba-2k-avoids-tattoo-copyrig...

If 'de minimis' use exists in software, what realistic scenario are you thinking of where a single character is enough?

To be clear, I think zero shared characters can still show copyright infringement, for reasons you mentioned about abstraction-filtration-comparison.

But your "entirely possible" example had no other shared similarities beyond a single character, and I can't see how any court wouldn't think that was a de minimis use of that character - assuming it had copyright protections in the first place!

> The amount of copying does not matter for a copyright claim.

It absolutely does for fair use analysis, see 17 USC § 107: “[…] In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—[…]the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole”

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