Re: Unibyte characters, strings, and buffers

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 01:03:15 +0900
> Cc: dancol@dancol.org, monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii writes:
> 
>  > AFAIU, copyright protects only the form, not the ideas.  Ideas can
>  > be described and discussed at any level of detail, because
>  > implementation of those same ideas by another person will never,
>  > except by improbable accident, be so close to the original as to be
>  > suspected of copying.
> 
> Unfortunately, many cases that some observers believe involve
> independent invention in fact were resolved in favor of the plaintiff
> on the basis that the appearance was sufficiently similar, and the
> defendent couldn't prove non-copying.  Your "probability" argument
> doesn't hold up.

Please show your references for that.  IANAL, but just by reading
related stuff on the Internet, I arrive to the opposite conclusion.
For example, here are citations from the last part of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organization,
which seem to uphold my understanding and contradict yours:

  Competitors may create programs that provide essentially the same
  functionality as a protected program as long as they do not copy the
  code. The trend has been for courts to say that even if there are
  non-literal SSO similarities, there must be proof of copying. Some
  relevant court decisions allow for reverse-engineering to discover
  ideas that are not subject to copyright within a protected
  program. The ideas can be implemented in a competing program as long
  as the developers do not copy the original expression. With a clean
  room design approach one team of engineers derives a functional
  specification from the original code, and then a second team uses
  that specification to design and built the new code.
  [...]
  The judge [in the Oracle v Google case] asked for [both Google and
  Oracle] to comment on a ruling by the European Court of Justice in a
  similar case that found "Neither the functionality of a computer
  program nor the programming language and the format of data files
  used in a computer program in order to exploit certain of its
  functions constitute a form of expression. Accordingly, they do not
  enjoy copyright protection." On 31 May 2012 the judge ruled that "So
  long as the specific code used to implement a method is different,
  anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code
  to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any
  methods used in the Java API."