In gnu.misc.discuss Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:
Alan Mackenzie wrote:
In gnu.misc.discuss Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:
Alan Mackenzie wrote:
Does copyright law have any notion of "a complete program"?
;-)
No. Copyright law has the notion of a collective work, which
is <http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf> a work,
such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in
which a number of contributions, constituting separate and
independent works in themselves, are assembled into a
collective whole.
The law's definition of a computer program is A ?computer
program? is a set of statements or instructions to be used
directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a
certain result.
This definition does not contain any notion of completeness, that
is, that the computer program must be able to perform its
function without the assistance of other computer programs.
I disagree. It says "a set" of instructions which gets the certain
result. That implies that it includes the other programs and all
the bits of the operating system and BIOS it uses, otherwise that
set couldn't bring about any result, no matter how uncertain.
Which is kind of ridiculous.
Or you might say that the "set" of instructions, although used to
bring about the result, needn't achieve it on its own, much as you
use a knive to make lunch. Well now the problem is that an
arbitrarily small fragment of the whole program, even just a single
machine instruction, counts as "a set" of instructions, hence is,
legally, "a program". This is even more ridiculous.
Which goes to show that lawyers cant rigorously pin down technical
concepts any better than technologists can, and that you've got to
use plain common sense in reading the definitions, which aren't and
can't be 100% complete and rigorous.