From: Howard C. <hy...@hi...> - 2007-11-07 02:24:36
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Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:24:13 +0000 From: Keith Marshall <kei...@us...> >> > But, back to the main point: the argument is that pure facts are >> > simply not copyrightable. Microsoft may grant one a license that >> > allows (or prohibits) copying of their software, files, data, etc. >> > However, they cannot prevent someone from repeating any purely factual >> > information contained in their SDK. > On grounds of copyright infringement, no; but they have declared the > contained data to be privileged information, governed by the terms of an > EULA which expressly forbids such disclosure. Without any documented > successful legal challenge of that EULA, in a court of law, I am loathe > to accept this argument. >> > Back to the point: this is all irrelevant: simple facts are not >> > copyrightable. No copyright has been broken as none exists. > > Let's get off this irrelevant copyright bandwagon; it *isn't* a > copyright issue; it *is* an issue of *potential* misuse of privileged > information. So you're really talking about Trade Secrets. Something like http://www.nhpatlaw.com/trademarks.htm http://www.thetso.com/Info/fail.html Some key points - the old joke "3 can keep a secret if 2 of them are dead" applies - a secret only qualifies as such if it is restricted to a very limited number of individuals. Once it is disseminated to a large population, it is no longer a secret. Once any information is made available to the public, it loses its protection. As far as the MinGW project is concerned, I think it's sufficient to just maintain attributions of where contributions came from. If the information is already widely disseminated, then it's not our problem. Likewise, if it ever came to court, the case would be against whoever violated their EULA, and presumably no one on the MinGW side of things has ever agreed to such a thing, so there is nothing binding here, no standing for a case. -- -- Howard Chu Chief Architect, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/ |