Re: [boost] Legal problem with Stackoverflow contribution under the "Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0" license

On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 6:48 PM, Niall Douglas via Boost wrote:

On 19/02/2018 22:57, Tim Song via Boost wrote:

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On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 3:41 PM, Niall Douglas via Boost wrote:

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But it's a non-point. If you follow the full discussion of the reuse of snippets on stackoverflow, reuse of small pieces of code which are not self standing programs, or functionality in themselves, is not copyright infringement in most jurisdictions. cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc. after all.

In which the courts found copyright infringement over a nine-line literally copied rangeCheck function.

That was the jury's verdict in the first case. The judge overrode that in a ruling which can be read at http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1202.pdf. In that he lays out the many cases where copyright cannot be infringed on a snippet, and the importance of originality as far as copyright is concerned.

The judge most certainly did not override the jury on the rangeCheck issue. And that opinion you cite - dealing with the copyrightability of APIs - is overturned on appeal.