[Haskell-cafe] containers license issue

Chris Smith cdsmith at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 11:00:17 CET 2012


"Ketil Malde" <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
> The point of the point is that neither of these are translations of
> literary works, there is no precedence for considering them as such, and
> that reading somebody's work (whether literary or source code) before
> writing one's own does not imply that the 'somebody' will hold any
> rights to the subsequent work.

So IANAL, but I do have an amateur interest in copyright law.  The debate
over the word "translation" is completely irrelevant.  The important point
is whether it is a "derived work".  That phrase certainly includes more
than mere translation.  For example, it includes writing fiction that's set
in the same fantasy universe or HHS the same characters as another author's
works.  It also includes making videos with someone else's music playing in
the background. If you create a derived work, then the author of the
original definitely has rights to it, regardless of whether it is a mere
translation.  That's also why the word "derived" in a comment was
particularly Dacey to the legal staff and probably caused them to overreact
in this case.

The defense in the case of software is to say that the part that was copied
was not a work of authorship in the sense that, say, a fiction character
is.  This is generally not a hard case to win, since courts see computer
software as dominated by its practical function.  But if you copied
something that was clearly a matter of expression and not related to the
function of the software, you could very well be creating a derived work
over which the original author could assert control.

That said, I agree that in this particular case it's very unlikely that the
original author could have won an infringement case.  I just balked a
little at the statements about translation, which was really just an
example.
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