Re: [Savannah-hackers] submission of japitools - savannah.nongnu.org

[Alaska Subedi]

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Stuart Ballard wrote:
| Stuart Ballard wrote:
|
|> I'm not a lawyer so my reasoning is more based on common sense than
|> the law. I'm fully aware that the law may not follow common sense, so
|> I defer to your judgement as to whether my argument would hold legal
|> water.
|>
|> Basically, my reasoning is that the japi file contains no information
|> that isn't in the public domain. The format is specifically designed
|> to cover only information necessary for compatibly implementing an
|> API. My understanding is that public interfaces and APIs are not
|> copyrightable, so the information in the japi file must logically be
|> in the public domain also.
|
|
| It occurs to me that some of the information I've read on Groklaw
| regarding the SCO case provides a further indication that this reasoning
| might be legally valid.
|
| Apparently the legal process for defining a "derived work" in computer
| software for the purposes of copyright law is called the
| "abstraction-filtration-comparison test". A reference is here:
| http://www.ladas.com/Patents/Computer/SoftwareAndCopyright/Softwa06.html
|
| (the word "patents" in the URL appears to be a red herring - the page
| refers to copyrights only).
|
| The important part to consider with regard to japi files is the
| "filtration" step. To perform this step, as described by the page linked
| above, one must "separate out protectable elements of the expression
| from unprotectable material. Such unprotectable materials include
| elements dictated by efficiency, elements dictated by external factors,
| and elements taken from the public domain."
|
| "dictated by external factors" covers the content in a japi file - the
| "external factor" being compatibility. I remember reading a page on
| Groklaw that made it explicit that publically-available APIs and
| elements necessary to implement them were unprotectable, but I can't
| find that page now.
|
| This means that my logic in saying that the contents of japi files are
| unprotectable matches, as far as I can see, the logic that judges and
| lawyers use to determine whether something's a derived work.
|
| So I'm now fairly sure that it's legal to distribute JDK japi files.
|
| BTW, any progress on getting the japitools project approved?
|
| Thanks,
|
| Stuart.
|

Thank you for the information you provided. I have approved your
project.

Could you please note somewhere in the project's webpage or in the
japi files' tarball that they were generated using japize so as to
avoid the confusion that it might have been created by hand. (If it
were created by hand, it would require copyright notice.)

You will recieve further information in automated email.

Regards,

Alaska Subedi
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