At 02:37 PM 2/10/2002, Francois Gouget wrote:
Then you must object to the radios broadcasting hundred of thousands of non-free copyrighted materials on the air. Surely with so many songs being broadcasted any singer or musician must be at an awfully high risk of being sued.
If you write a song, and the melody is very similar to that of a song you have heard, you very well may be sued if your song becomes popular. Fortunately, this does not happen very often. However, the precedent of George Harrison shows that copyright infringement need not be conscious to be actionable. You can be sued if you were exposed to the original work and there's a substantial similarity.
(The engineers who implemented the Phoenix BIOS, for example, had never even programmed the x86 family of processors before. This was a specific requirement; anyone who had written a line of 8088 assembler was rejected for the job.)
I hope you realize that what you are saying is that Wine is illegal since most contributors have been developping programs on Windows and have thus all had exposure to the Windows API and headers (similar to having written 8088 assembly before).
Not hiring programmers who had worked with 8088 assembler before was probably not necessary. However, it demonstrates the extreme precautions Phoenix took to avoid lawsuits from IBM, which was litigious and had almost infinitely deep pockets. Phoenix wanted to be able to indemnify its customers against copyright infringement suits to encourage them to use its products.
In the case of WINE, exposure to documentation of the APIs is likely to be OK. Why? Because application programs written by programmers exposed to these materials are generally not considered to be derivative works.
However, exposure to the source code of a program whose copyright one could be accused of infringing (in the case of WINE, this would be the source of Windows itself) would definitely NOT be OK. This is why one cannot read (L)GPLed code and then write commercial programs. The FSF is likely to be a nasty litigant, and gets its legal services for free. It would gladly bankrupt you if it would mean wiping out a commercial developer.
Again, are you telling us that writers only read their own writings for fear of being sued?
No. But the author who sued J.K. Rowling had written books which featured creatures called "muggles" and a dark-haired boy named -- I'm not making this up! -- Larry Potter. If Rowling did NOT (consciously or unconsciously) copy this author's work, it would be an incredible coincidence.
How many suits of these types have occurred?
Quite a few. But even more often, threats are made and people who cannot afford to go to court are forced to back down. These cases seldom make the papers.
--Brett Glass