Andrei's Google Talk

[retard]

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 16:21:38 +0200, klickverbot wrote:

> On 9/21/10 3:55 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> People seem to think that an accusation is proof. If someone says you
>> stole their code, because you read it, it's not always true. It's just
>> much easier to prove you didn't steal it if you didn't read it.
> 
> And how exactly are you going to prove that you didn't read it?

The western court system AFAIK operates with the presumption of 
innocence. I've seen some cases against GPLed software. The commercial 
company used freely licensed code without releasing their own associated 
code in any form. Although they tried to convince it's a contract 
violation and GPL is an invalid contract anyways, the judges decided to 
apply the copyright law in these cases and the GPL project won the case.

What kind of evidence they used against the infringing application? Well, 
the offending software only came in binary form and the original was 
publicly available as source code. The binaries contained function 
signatures, function body code, and strings in exactly the same form as 
the GPLed software when compiled with some mainstream copiler (MSVC++, 
GCC). The shady company later tried to obfuscate these signatures in 
updated versions but the experts showed how the code is essentially the 
same after removing the obfuscation (same calling sequences, same logic 
paths etc.)

In my opinion it's difficult to find phony evidence against a software 
developer in Europe, because associations like EFF may assist you, 
software isn't patentable, and very small pieces of code aren't even 
copyrightable. It's quite unlikely that given two nontrivial application 
they share many function signatures or strings. An innocent software 
developer won't start obfuscating his sources when some commercial entity 
starts threatening.