Quote:
Originally Posted by DuckieTigger
How do you suggest to go about it then? There has to be some copy protection system in place for software. Something that prevents a simple disassemble and recompile with different optimization options. Different executable, same features without doing copy and paste.
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The basic model is sensible: patents for ideas, copyright for implementation.
There is value in software and investments of time and money in creating them. Software in all its forms is worthy of protection and copyrighting the source code is the proper tool and place to do it as it protects against unathorized derivatives but allows true clean room copies. It's good policy.
In literary spaces you copyright specific stories but not plot ideas or titles.
You can tell the same essential story idea (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets alien vampire and dies) a hundred different times as long as you tell it in different ways. Lots of writers make a good living telling the same story over and over.
Oracle vs Google is different from most software catfights because there is a smoking gun and the derivative product is, as the appeals court said, a one for one replacement of the original. Google simply didn't want to pay for a license.
Most of the people opposed to Oracle's position are only opposed because of the expected disruption from a definitive Oracle win, not because they don't think Android "plagiarized" Java. Most would be the first to sue if it was "their" software getting ripped off.
The key thing to remember is the Android API started out as an exact copy of Java *and* the interpreter used Java code. In legal terms that makes the entire product (Android) an unlicensed Java derivative. It is not unlike the mess with J++ where Microsoft had to pay Sun for creating a Java derivative, something they did not have a license to do.
Creatives have to be protected or they won't have reason to create.
As "the irascible Harlan Ellison" says: pay the writer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE