Accused of copyright infridgment

[Ben Finney]

On 05-Feb-2008, no-reply wrote:
> Ended that experience, I decided to develop from scratch a "clone" 
> of such model. I didn't absolutelly copy any class, function, 
> algorithm, line or whatsoever of such program, even because, as it 
> has been developed for tens of years by different people in 
> different contests, it was quite a "spaghetti code" and it wasn't 
> very clear at all!

Did you have access to the code in order to develop your system?

If so, you will have a difficult time showing that your work is not a 
derivative of the earlier one. It is for this reason that the "clean 
room" <URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design> 
implementation approach is often taken. Did you take such an approach, 
and can you show evidence that this is the case?

> Rather, I started again with the very general concepts and I 
> re-wrote from scratch the program, that ended being rather different 
> from those original and I published it as GPL.

This statement would seem to be the basis of what you're claiming. The 
issue would be whether you can show evidence that you implemented your 
work without infringing copyright in the earlier work.

Is copyright the only violation they are claiming? Ignore meaningless 
"intellectual property" claims and look for what specific law they 
claim you're violating.

> Thanks,
>     Antonello Lobianco

Please fix your "From" field in the header of your messages, so that 
it shows your name.

-- 
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  `\   is that there is no 'them' out there. It's just an awful lot of |
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Ben Finney <ben at benfinney.id.au>
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