[Haskell-cafe] containers license issue

[Mike Meyer]

Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
>Clark Gaebel <cgaebel at uwaterloo.ca> writes:
>> I just did a quick derivation from
>> http://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html#RoundUpPowerOf2 
>A copyrighted work, you say?

The work is copyrighted, the snippets are placed in the placed in the public domain. This is old hat - you can copyright a collection of non-copyrightable objects.
>I think this is wrong, copyright does not cover algorithms, and reverse
>engineering is not literary translation.

As it's commonly understood, reverse engineering doesn't involve looking at the code. That's why it's called "reverse engineering" instead of "copying." If  you never had access to the code, you couldn't have copied it. Of course, you can't produce a literary translation of it, either.

>The implications of anything else would be draconian

Calling the current state of copyright law in the US draconian might be going a little far. But only a little.

>simply documenting a program would be a breach of its copyright

Documenting code has run into copyright issue before. That's why *both* volumes of the Lion's book were pulled from publication. Documenting codes behavior as a black box or how you use it isn't a problem. If you say "function F finds the highest one it in it's argument" or  "call f(x) to find the highest one bit in x" and I then write a function f that behaves that way, there can't have been a copyright violation, because I never saw the source to f. If you *give* me that source, and I translate the code to another language, then I've created a derived work, which means copyright law applies. If you give me the source to f, and I write a function that does the same thing - then I may or may not have copied it. This means I *could* wind up in court over the thing, which is exactly the possibility that the lawyer is trying to avoid.

>Tanenbaum would hold the copyright to Linux.

Only if Tanenbaum documented the internal behavior of Linux before it was written.

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