On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 07:10:46PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > You're invited to demonstrate an instance of someone coming up with the > exact same expression of the exact same copyrightable idea being sued > for copyright infringement and winning on the grounds of independent > reinvention. For bonus points make it an instance where they had access > to the original work. This is not a fair request, at least within the U.S., because such cases will tend to get settled out-of-court with a gag order on the parties forbidding disclosure of the terms of the settlement. For example, it is at least plausible that this maybe been the case in the USL v. BSDI (a.k.a. AT&T v. UCB) lawsuit. We still don't know what was admitted to by whom under that settlement. Computer source code, because of its formal nature, is particularly *likely*, in fact, to lead to such instances that you ridicule as vanishingly unlikely. > Personally, I consider the possibility of anyone being able to get away > with a defense of that form exceedinly unlikely. Ah, the argument from personal incredulity. -- G. Branden Robinson | It just seems to me that you are Debian GNU/Linux | willfully entering an arse-kicking branden@debian.org | contest with a monstrous entity http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | that has sixteen legs and no arse.
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