Hugh Wimberly wrote: [...]
don't want to work harder than I have to, as long as I'm respecting copyright. The reason I asked in the first place is because I need to know if I should revise my proposal; without using anything but strictly scholarly sources, I think the DFA-based regex I write will only be able to handle a limited subset of cases and the "hybrid" portion won't come into
http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise27.html <quote> One way to avoid infringement when writing a program that is similar to another program is through the use of a clean room procedure. This is what was done when companies cloned the BIOS of the IBM personal computer to produce compatible systems. In a clean room procedure, there are two separate teams working on the development of the new program. The first team determines how the original program works, by examining its source code if it is available (IBM published the source code for its BIOS in a technical manual), by reverse engineering the program (by converting its object code back to source code and attempting to understand it or by testing it to see how it behaves), or by studying available user manuals and other descriptions of the programs function. This first team puts together a complete technical specification that describes the functioning of the original program. Such a specification is not an infringement, since the copyright in the original program doesnt protect its functionality, only the expression in the program that creates that functionality. Generally, an intellectual property attorney will review the functional specification to assure that it does not contain any protected expression from the original program. Given the functional specification, a second team of programmers, metaphorically in a clean room uncontaminated by the original program, implements the new program. These programmers have not seen the source code of the original program. In fact, it is best if they have never seen any aspect of the original program, getting all their knowledge of it from the functional specification. Because they havent seen the original program, they cannot be copying it, even unconsciously. </quote> regards, alexander.