Hold on. Regardless of the interest of the question, Mentors.ln is not a new place to ask for legal advice (especially someone like Jeremiah who i would certainly not qualify as newbie, if he is the jeremiah i am thinking of...). This type of question is more apt for the list as a whole (afaik) or their lawyer in their jutisdiction (sorry to take a harder line on this). 

Of course, we can answer,  to promote the new forum... and I think i concur with KP (the question would probably be jurisdiction specific) ..., but just wanted to raise a question of order ....

I should probably change the subject line for internal discussion, but my idea of mentors.ln is a place to get newbies (excuse the expression) up to speed on Foss licencing, not oldbies  with copyright questions. 



Malcolm, de mi dispositivo movil/cellphone 


-------- Mensaje original --------
De: Carlo Piana <carlo@piana.eu>
Fecha: 24/5/16 14:39 (GMT+01:00)
Para: Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah.foster@pelagicore.com>, mentors.ln@lists.fsfe.org
Asunto: Re: [Mentors of the Legal Network] What is a code "snippet" and how is it licensed?


Looks like it's below threshold. So it's nothing. If it was above threshold, it would have been protected, nothing exists halfway.

Where the line is placed is an entirely different matter. The degree of freedom, complexity and length of the code (others?) are the metrics. But see in the Google / Oracle case, that was argued endlessly and the judge had to learn programming to solve the puzzle.

Carlo

PS good first post for mentors, methinks




On 24 May 2016, Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah.foster@pelagicore.com> wrote:
Hi,

Does a code snippet have any legal definition or meaning? I ask because when working on compliance with a company they're told that code snippets implicitly contain the license they were under originally. This makes sense of course, you cannot copy something from a GPL'd file and then claim it is your copyright, that seems unfair. But what if separately one has written the exact same function. Given that in many cases there are only a few specific ways to do things, this might  not be that far-fetched. 

Here's my strawman:

In this GNU file http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/hurd/glibc.git/tree/io/access.c there is code that tests the properties of a given file for access. This is a small C source code file of about 40 lines, nearly half of which is a license header. What if one saw these lines;

 {
  if (file == NULL || (type & ~(R_OK|W_OK|X_OK|F_OK)) != 0)
    {
      __set_errno (EINVAL);
      return -1;
    }

  __set_errno (ENOSYS);
  return -1;
}

in a proprietary file somewhere. It is half of the code from the access.c file, but arguably likely the only way to do this particular task. Yes, you can rearrange the the R_OK (read okay) and W_OK (write okay) etc, but this is merely cosmetic, the functionality remains the same. 

To me, this mere snippet lacks the originality test of copyright, but cutting and pasting it is considered presumably to be a copyright violation and requires use under the GPL since the original code is under the GPL.

Is this how one treats "snippets"? Are they recognized as a type of enforceable copyrighted unit? 

Many thanks,

Jeremiah

--
Jeremiah C. Foster
GENIVI COMMUNITY MANAGER

Pelagicore AB
Ekelundsgatan 4, 6tr, SE-411 18
Gothenburg, Sweden
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