Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hxa7241 | Hacker News Reader

This is ultimately more by luck than judgement. Because the main legal perspective is utterly, fundamentally flawed. The notion that there is a principled difference between idea and expression simply does not work with software. In software everything is an abstraction, which means everything has some generality. There is no dividing line anymore.

The idea/expression rule of thumb only made sense because it was a simple proxy for actual market effect. And there is the nub of the matter: no-one really wants to measure what the real market effects are for any of these rules. The law is unhinged from reality. It is just stupid.

For copyright to make sense, we should get rid of all the lawyers and remove it from the legal domain. Copyright is really a matter of data measurement and analysis. If the negative effects of restricting and paying for movement of information are outweighed by the positive effects of creating information, let us measure that . . .

We built the internet, but then we want to rule it as if it were a small stack of manuscripts. It is ridiculous.

The difference between idea and expression of software: Idea=the abstraction Expression=the code, UML diagram, compiled binary, etc.

It's really not that complicated.

When two people independently construct the same code with only trivial naming differences, what then? Is that a copyrightable expression or is it an uncopyrightable idea?

The problem I think GP is citing is that it's unreasonable when one piece of code violates copyright for carrying out some function, and another piece of code does not violate copyright for carrying out that function, even though after being run through some automated transformations (for example, an optimizing compiler), the machine code for the two pieces of code is near identical.

One person uses a for loop, another uses do while, another uses recursion. Copyright law doesn't care that they all do the same thing; one could be a copyright violation while the others are not.

If you abstract copyright to apply to the functionality of the code, you turn copyrights into patents. If you don't, anyone can tweak code to be literally different while having the same function.

The code is expression. Neither can enforce the code against the other; both can enforce against third parties (with registration).

Machine code cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law. It is not an issue in the Oracle/Google case.

You cannot abstract copyright. It is a codified legal doctrine (i.e., an expression), not an abstract set of ideas. On that note, however, the abstract idea behind copyright law (protection of intellectual property) is the justification for patent and trademark laws.

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