pmm98

To help me out? I’m patiently trying to explain to you that your mental model of copyright and particularly how it interacts with software is fundamentally flawed. I’m handwaving a lot of complexity when I refer to patents (and why clean rooms are important when dealing with implementation) because I’m not discussing patent law with you. I’m specifically responding to you saying “I didn’t clone a prior employer because copyrights.” That’s just factually wrong. Pulling me into “aha, but what about patents?” in a deep thread is extremely tiring.

I know how patents work. I hold 15 and I’ve defended two at trial. I’m tapping out here, since you’re simply competing with me to be less wrong the deeper this goes, and I’ve rapidly run out of patience to have intellectual property law explained to me by someone who doesn’t understand the fundamental purpose nor qualifications of copyright, and thinks it and fair use doctrine has any bearing on “I built a clone of Facebook”.

Wikipedia is speaking to a broader application of copyright than software. It’s also targeting an international audience, where this varies.

Again, you’re coming off uninformed here and relying on Wikipedia (which doesn’t speak to that context) isn’t really helping.

Clean room design of software has absolutely nothing to do with copyright because software concepts cannot be copyrighted. I would encourage you to study these legal concepts further before you debate them, because you’re coming off quite uninformed. Copyright has a specific purpose and specific limits. Studying a competitive software product and cloning it (even non clean room) is, again, not a copyright violation unless you’re literally pulling code from the competitive product. Nearly all clean rooms are to avoid patents and specific implementation thereof in the software space. This is different when it comes to other fields, so I get the confusion.

Theft of intellectual property in the case you cited also barely touches copyright. Put another way, copyright status of the property in question is largely immaterial to securing a conviction on the allegation.

That you think “copyright purity” is the issue to litigate points out that you’re not very clueful either, I’m afraid. If I quit Google and write a clone search engine using none of their code but all of their technical architecture, in no way does that interact with Google’s copyrights. At all. You can’t copyright an indexing strategy nor a software architecture. You can, however, copyright a Visio diagram of the architecture. That’s a different thing.

This also applies to your nod toward “a novel fair use argument” in a sibling comment. Fair use has absolutely nothing to do with this or any hypothetical like it. You may as well have cited bird law.

Copyright isn’t the blanket IP concept people think would cover most disputes. These types of cases get into trade dress, patent law, and other legal concepts. The fundamental limits of copyright are why software techniques are patented in the first place and one reason among many why you sign assignment when you join a company.

IANAL and my comment is U.S. biased. At least in the U.S., the fixed and tangible aspects of copyright are bite-sized enough to understand without a J.D. Given how murky this entire field is when it comes to IP, it’s extremely important to understand these concepts for even a line engineer, as well.

Of course it is. The apology is intended for damage control to repl.it and his personal reputation, given he has had an hour to digest the winds of HN on both and is clearly concerned by what he sees. Dollars to donuts he remains baffled why such a defense of his reputation and that of his company is even necessary in the first place. You don’t even need to be as cynical as I am to get there. It’s that transparent.

“I guess it’s just because of how I had to be as a struggling kid in Jordan” is the tell. He obviously has no idea why this feedback is happening if that’s his conclusion, so how can he apologize for any of it? He’s still retweeting sympathetic viewpoints on Twitter as we speak, so you can compute the honesty of this apology based on that fact alone.

Read “do better” as “avoid generating compromising receipts wherein I twice trot out lawyers and my ability to pay for them like I’m dramatically unsheathing Anduril, while privately maintaining my view that I’m being ripped off at every turn because someone had the gall to use Docker to build a REPL and I consider that clearly genius architecture to be sensitive intellectual property.” His takeaway going forward is to threaten people in a smarter way, and I’d bet my next paycheck on that.

Honestly, this whole saga is a hell of an invitation to compete against repl.it, in displaying such a severe decision-making and tactical weakness at the executive level.