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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA507 ; Thu, 04 Feb 93 08:00:17 EST Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ames!sgi!igor!jbass From: jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) Subject: George William Herbert's Challenge - Part 2 (opening arguments) Message-ID: <1993Feb3.002534.5637@igor.tamri.com> Organization: DMS Design References: <106742@netnews.upenn.edu> <1993Jan27.215738.12384@igor.tamri.com> <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 00:25:34 GMT Lines: 163 In article <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu> gwh@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert) writes: >Note that "general form" wont' cut it, under any interpretation >of copyright law as I understand it. I want to see procedures >that are the exact same, or just have had variable names altered, >or something similar. Or a damn good argument as to why two >pieces of code that do the same thing, but are written from scratch >by two seperate people at different places, are covered under one >copyright, and examples thereof. A number of people have taken this stand, and they clearly fail to understand what the copyright law and corresponding case law do and don't protect. Presenting this in it's entirety would take many hundreds of pages ... the summary that follows is to my best understanding accurate: Taken from "Numerical recipes in C", copyright Cambridge University Press 1988, preface page xv, which is a book of algorithms and they address the issue of use carefully: "Like artistic or literary compositions, computer programs can be protected by copyright. Generally it is an infringement for you to copy into your computer a program from a copyrighted source. It is also not a friendly thing to do, since it deprives the program's author of compensation for his or her creative effort. Although this book and its programs are copyrighted, we specifically authorize you, a reader of the book, to make one machine-readable copy of each program for your own use. You may wish to consider purchasing this book's collected programs in one of the machine-readable formats that are available (see front of book). Distribution of the machine-readable programs (either as copied by you or as purchased) to any other person is not authorized. "Copyright does not protect ideas, but only the expression of those ideas in a particular form. In the case of a computer program, the ideas consist of the programs's methodology and algorithm, including the sequence of processes adopted by the programmer. The expression ideas is the program source code and it's derived object code. "If you analyze the ideas contained in a program, and then express those ideas in your own distinct implementation, then that new program implementation belongs to you. ... "The fact that ideas are legally "free as air" in no way supersedes ethical requirement that ideas be credited to their known originators. ... " Sentence one accurately reflects a framework for "fair-use" of material presented any book. Sentence two accurately represents "ownership" under current case law, "methodology, algorithms, and sequence of processes". To translate the methodology, algorithms, and sequence of processes into any other form does not change the ownership. This means between puesdo code, english, C, or any other languague - human or machine readable. Sentence three represents **part** of the requirements to distinguish ownership. Additional case law imparts more requirements for reverse engineering of major works ... those works that extend beyond a simple collection of ideas. Sentence four imparts the ethical requirements that go beyond case law, and that nearly every research community strictly requires. This is the simple protection from plagiarizm. I will later show that Net-2 and 386BSD release by UCB violates the AT&T ownership by maintaining the same "methodology, algorithms and sequence of processes" in nearly all of the code cloned from both UNIX source and Bach puedocode. In turn, this will show that UCB both violates the AT&T Source License agreement and the Bach copyright, including any possible fair-use. In addition it will be shown that UCB directly used the AT&T design, both source code and Bach, without crediting the source of the "methodology, algorithms, and sequence of processes" - which is blatantly simple plagiarizm by any definition in the research community. *** In the mean time, I urge readers to review the above, find your own copy of Bach and examine the clock, tty and bio code in 386BSD. **** ..... now as an aside, I will respond to a couple more jabs .... Every CS faculty member should fully understand the above, as well as standards for plagiarism ... long before they managed to get their PhD. Every CS student should understand this as well prior to entering the work place. This is not a minor issue to ignore ... and the general tone of the postings up to this point (including rebuttals to my postings) show a lack of understanding of software ownership. In article <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu> gwh@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert) writes: >Even more annoying is your insistance that UCB computer science >graduates might be "tainted" by the "blatant CSRG copyright violations", >especially since you at the same time are insisting that holding >USL employees to task for what we believe are wrongdoings of their >company is morally wrong. I smell a significant morality >bias here, and I don't like it. First of all, I made no such claim that "graduates might be `tainted'". What I did say was: "I think hiring managers should be boycot hiring UCB grads until they clean up their act on plagiarism and require all existing students to attend a class on intelectual property rights. "I also think that all faculty, staff, and student assistants that participated and/or condoned this piracy should be removed or severely disciplined." Since UCB faculty and staff are attempting to ignore their plagiarism, then it's time to enforce what are considered to be acceptable limits, and make sure the students that take their side "as the truth" are properly "informed" in what the rest of the research community and commercial work places EXPECT. Given both your response, and those from a number of other UCB students (as well as students from other campus sites), it is clear that many of you have views which are counter to either Law or Practice. As stated by one recient graduate: "I just wanted to thank you for your recent posting to alt.suit.att-bsdi. As a fairly recent CS grad I had a very distorted (biased) view of the BSD<->ATT relationship. While I disagree with some of what you said, and want to disagree with more you have, however, painted a fairly clear picture of the facts. ... "An ethics class would be a good idea in any CS curriculum, CS majors seem to play a little fast and loose with other people's work (just a personal observation)." People boycot the products and services of organizations ALL THE TIME to provide social and economic presure on the org. This causes employees to loose their jobs/raises all the time ... and is one of the desired personal costs to make life difficult for management inside the org. Unions take this one step farther and directly hasle other union workers that cross the picket line. To boycot UCB, is to boycot it's products -- graduates -- making students directly aware and involved in the process will not only reduce it's admission applications, but place presure on the administration to stop stalling and resolve the dispute. It also sends the clear message that plagiarism is not acceptable in either school or industry. Management under current business law can and are held directly responsible for their actions in a vast number of crimes. Unfortunately, this same access is missing go after to government management. In this case individuals broke the law, with forethought, knowing that at worst they would loose their job. Had the same occured in business, the corporate exec's and middle management could have been held directly responsible -- that gives them the urge to CYA and keep tabs on things below. In this case, no one can be, just the State of Calif/UCB -- leads to selective blindness and I didn't knows. In naming UCB in the BSDI suit, USL did not ask for damages from UCB, just a simple acknowledgement that UCB violated AT&T/USL rights. AT&T/USL could have, and may yet, get mad enough at UCB to ask for damages. John Bass DMS Design