Where do I begin?

[John D. Gwinner]

Tony:
>Firstly, they are not forced to do so in order to protect copyright.

>You are conflating all types of intellectual property into one ball of
>confusion, whereas their characteristics under law are quite distinct.

Of course, it's called "Generalizing"  This isn't the point I'm making.
GENERALLY speaking, intellectual property has to be enforced, or it's in the
danger of being lost.  Do you disagree with this?  That's all I'm trying to
say.  Of course copyrights are distinct from Trademark violations.

> It has nothing to do with the issue
>of clean-room requirements.  You are talking about a hypothetical
>world in which Sun's copyright has been violated.  I am talking about
>the case in which Sun's copyright is not violated, but clean-room
>requirements have been dropped.  Two completely disjoint cases.


But this is my point.  It's not *IF* the copyright has been violated, it's
if it *appears* to be violated.  Thus, the two cases are NOT disjoint, which
is what I've been trying to say.

How can you prove that a piece of code, is a copyright violation or not?
Tough.  It's easier for Sun's lawyers to show copyright violation.  How many
different ways are there to implement, say, pushing arguments on a stack?
I'm sure that there are many areas where Kaffe is similar or downright
identical to Sun source, at least if it duplicates the JVM spec.

However, by maintaining clean room, then it's easy for Kaffe to say "Not an
intentional violation, we haven't seen the source; it's a parallel
development"

Do you see now what I'm saying?

In the courtroom, it's not the absolute of *IF* something has happened, it's
what you can prove.  With a clean room, Kaffe can *prove* it hasn't seen the
source, therefore can't have infringed.  Without a clean room, Kaffe can't
prove anything, and it's easy for Sun to prove that the source code is the
same (at least in portions).

        == John ==