On Sun, 10 Feb 2002, Brett Glass wrote: [...]
For the same reason that George Harrison was convicted for writing a song ("My Sweet Lord") that was similar, but not identical, to one he'd once heard, even though he was not conscious of doing any copying.
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. Especially since we all have been exposed to this non-free copyrighted material since before birth. The only possible conclusion is that most musicians must have lost their livelihoods and that lawsuits such as the above must abound.
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(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).
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J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, was recently sued and accused of copying specific elements of other children's books. The books she was accused of copying are quite different from hers in most respects.
Again, are you telling us that writers only read their own writings for fear of being sued? How many suits of these types have occurred?
Your analogies are not convincing and seem based on annecdotes. I see them as insufficient to support your sweeping doomsday claims.
-- Francois Gouget fgouget@free.fr http://fgouget.free.fr/ The software said it requires Win95 or better, so I installed Linux.