EVERYTHING IS DERIVATIVE OF EVERYTHING...

[Fernando]

....and the degrees of derivation compared with sheer invention are difficult to asses. It is all about that degree. 10% of identical code lines are enough to punish the thing as a robbery? ¿ Perhaps we need 50%?
Or even we could say: it does not matter how many equal lines exist, because the extra lines that did not exist before are such a wonderful novelty and such a powerful innovation that the result is altogether new. .
In general terms there is not ONE invention in ANY field coming from the blue. And there is scarcely once invention or idea that was not being prepared or developed by several guys at the same time.
In my opinion, being so as I say it is, we should keep the accusation of cloning to clearly copied stuff, say, one where the high degree of copy -80% or more- is associated to a condition of NON new things added to that.
Rybka, by example, it is said have been made on the basis of Fruit. Nevertheless, clearly the author added new and important things to it, so we can say it is an original product as much as technical advance makes possible to talk about originality properly speaking.
Same with ippolit even if they took some Rybka part to begin with.

At last the ultimate test is the performance: if something perform better and/or differently than the source, IT is new stuff.
I make exception of things that perform differently because the copy was awkwardly made. An example are the nasty cars the Chinese makes...


Fern

[BB+]

Rybka, by example, it is said have been made on the basis of Fruit. Nevertheless, clearly the author added new and important things to it, so we can say it is an original product as much as technical advance makes possible to talk about originality properly speaking.
Same with ippolit even if they took some Rybka part to begin with.
At last the ultimate test is the performance: if something perform better and/or differently than the source, IT is new stuff.

This would be my take too. The main counterpoint I can imagine is if you take an existing engine, make one "super-tweak", and gain 50-100 ELO from an afternoon of work. The new idea is certainly yours, but I personally would say that this inventor should either write a chess engine from scratch with this new idea (which might be a pain, as getting everything else sufficiently tuned so as to compete at the top-level might be a substantial burden), or make the idea known (which might lead to no one believing that it actually works, until demonstrated otherwise). The alternative, of publishing the existing engine with your super-tweak, is totally legit with (most) open-source software, while at the other end of spectrum, seems impermissible if you fail to mention the fact that the "existing engine" was borrowed for 90%+ of the code. The middle is more murky, but appears to be where most cases of interest lie.

[Bo Persson]

....and the degrees of derivation compared with sheer invention are difficult to asses. It is all about that degree. 10% of identical code lines are enough to punish the thing as a robbery? ¿ Perhaps we need 50%?
Or even we could say: it does not matter how many equal lines exist, because the extra lines that did not exist before are such a wonderful novelty and such a powerful innovation that the result is altogether new. .

No, writing a chess program is very much like writing a book. You cannot "borrow" 10% or 50% of the text from another book, or add an extra chapter and call it your own book.

The ideas are free, the expression is what is protected. You know that!

[Jeremy Bernstein]

....and the degrees of derivation compared with sheer invention are difficult to asses. It is all about that degree. 10% of identical code lines are enough to punish the thing as a robbery? ¿ Perhaps we need 50%?
Or even we could say: it does not matter how many equal lines exist, because the extra lines that did not exist before are such a wonderful novelty and such a powerful innovation that the result is altogether new. .

No, writing a chess program is very much like writing a book. You cannot "borrow" 10% or 50% of the text from another book, or add an extra chapter and call it your own book.

The ideas are free, the expression is what is protected. You know that!

These debates are very reminiscent of the music industry debates at the dawn of hip-hop, as sampling became a commonplace technique for creating new tracks. At that time, there were various groups lobbying for limitations on the number of seconds used, the recognizability, the contribution of the sample to the overall identity of the new work, etc. Ultimately, none of these were really satisfactory, and the current law (in the US, at least) requires any use of copyrighted samples, no matter what length (as long as it's not covered by fair use copyright laws), to be licensed.

It's a complex issue, though: I might start with a sample as raw material and modify it beyond all recognizability -- is it a new work? Kind of, but kind of not: the nature of the work, its very existence, is bound up in the raw material used. At the very least, credit is due.

The RE case is, to me, more like hiring an orchestra or studio band to play the bit of music that you wish you could sample, but can't because the mechanical licensing fees are too high (see Portishead). You make your own version of the same ideas and use them.

Jeremy

[Hood]

The new rules of physics are based often on previous rules. Can they use the previous ones without breaking the law.

V = V1 + V2;
V = (V1 + V2)/ SQRT( 1 + V1 * V2/ C*C) , C light velocity

Is Einstein Newton plagiator or opposite

All programs all derivatives somehow : by ideas, by parts of code, by algorithms.

Even writing our program from scratch we do not know if we are not using existing constructions.


'Nihil novi sub solem' old romans proverb

[Fernando]

Something else:
the comparison that some pals here has made with writing books and music is wrong, I think. Both music and books are objects of art and for them applied different rules. The value of a piece of art is its entirety, its total shape as such and NOT,as in technical artifacts, an output.
If I take some technological commodities already known and I produce with them something capable of a better output you are doing what science and technology does and cannot but do.
A work of art is valuable by itself, not as an eventual tool for doing something better. Maths are tools, law of physics are a tool, a wheel is a tool, a piece of code is a tool.
Symphony 41 by Mozart is not. If you take a piece of it to write your own symphony, that is plagiarism. What I can take is music technique as such. I can use chromatic scales, B flat chords, etc. But I cannot take a piece of music from score 123 to 345.
In the case of chess programming, not because the code is "written" it is a piece of art like a chapter of Dostoevsky. It is a technical device that many times reproduces an already known device to get something done. Like bit boards, etc.
I agree that if you copy entirely the code clearly your are cloning., but if you take it just as a tool for something clearly different and even better, that is another ball game.

In any case a fussy issue

Fern

[Chris Whittington]

Something else:
the comparison that some pals here has made with writing books and music is wrong, I think. Both music and books are objects of art and for them applied different rules. The value of a piece of art is its entirety, its total shape as such and NOT,as in technical artifacts, an output.
If I take some technological commodities already known and I produce with them something capable of a better output you are doing what science and technology does and cannot but do.
A work of art is valuable by itself, not as an eventual tool for doing something better. Maths are tools, law of physics are a tool, a wheel is a tool, a piece of code is a tool.
Symphony 41 by Mozart is not. If you take a piece of it to write your own symphony, that is plagiarism. What I can take is music technique as such. I can use chromatic scales, B flat chords, etc. But I cannot take a piece of music from score 123 to 345.
In the case of chess programming, not because the code is "written" it is a piece of art like a chapter of Dostoevsky. It is a technical device that many times reproduces an already known device to get something done. Like bit boards, etc.
I agree that if you copy entirely the code clearly your are cloning., but if you take it just as a tool for something clearly different and even better, that is another ball game.

In any case a fussy issue

Fern

it is nothing like writing a book.

With a book, the author writes it and the reader sees what is written and interprets it.

With a program, the author writes it and the reader sees only the output. It would only be a book if the author published the entire source.

You are right btw, there's very little new under the sun

[hyatt]

Something else:
the comparison that some pals here has made with writing books and music is wrong, I think. Both music and books are objects of art and for them applied different rules. The value of a piece of art is its entirety, its total shape as such and NOT,as in technical artifacts, an output.
If I take some technological commodities already known and I produce with them something capable of a better output you are doing what science and technology does and cannot but do.
A work of art is valuable by itself, not as an eventual tool for doing something better. Maths are tools, law of physics are a tool, a wheel is a tool, a piece of code is a tool.
Symphony 41 by Mozart is not. If you take a piece of it to write your own symphony, that is plagiarism. What I can take is music technique as such. I can use chromatic scales, B flat chords, etc. But I cannot take a piece of music from score 123 to 345.
In the case of chess programming, not because the code is "written" it is a piece of art like a chapter of Dostoevsky. It is a technical device that many times reproduces an already known device to get something done. Like bit boards, etc.
I agree that if you copy entirely the code clearly your are cloning., but if you take it just as a tool for something clearly different and even better, that is another ball game.

In any case a fussy issue

Fern

it is nothing like writing a book.

With a book, the author writes it and the reader sees what is written and interprets it.

With a program, the author writes it and the reader sees only the output. It would only be a book if the author published the entire source.

You are right btw, there's very little new under the sun

DO not agree with that reasoning. The author writes a program, and the reader _does_ interpret the program, with "a little help from an assistant known as a microprocessor." Or are you saying you can write a book, I can read it verbally and record it, and then sell the recording as an original work? Even if my "reading" is not always "word for word" but has some added expressiveness included?

[Chris Whittington]

Something else:
the comparison that some pals here has made with writing books and music is wrong, I think. Both music and books are objects of art and for them applied different rules. The value of a piece of art is its entirety, its total shape as such and NOT,as in technical artifacts, an output.
If I take some technological commodities already known and I produce with them something capable of a better output you are doing what science and technology does and cannot but do.
A work of art is valuable by itself, not as an eventual tool for doing something better. Maths are tools, law of physics are a tool, a wheel is a tool, a piece of code is a tool.
Symphony 41 by Mozart is not. If you take a piece of it to write your own symphony, that is plagiarism. What I can take is music technique as such. I can use chromatic scales, B flat chords, etc. But I cannot take a piece of music from score 123 to 345.
In the case of chess programming, not because the code is "written" it is a piece of art like a chapter of Dostoevsky. It is a technical device that many times reproduces an already known device to get something done. Like bit boards, etc.
I agree that if you copy entirely the code clearly your are cloning., but if you take it just as a tool for something clearly different and even better, that is another ball game.

In any case a fussy issue

Fern

it is nothing like writing a book.

With a book, the author writes it and the reader sees what is written and interprets it.

With a program, the author writes it and the reader sees only the output. It would only be a book if the author published the entire source.

You are right btw, there's very little new under the sun

DO not agree with that reasoning. The author writes a program, and the reader _does_ interpret the program, with "a little help from an assistant known as a microprocessor." Or are you saying you can write a book, I can read it verbally and record it, and then sell the recording as an original work? Even if my "reading" is not always "word for word" but has some added expressiveness included?

the 'reader' interprets the OUTPUT of the program, everything else is hidden to him. And no, I am not saying the blah-blah you're asking me above.

Some programs have more artistic outputs than others. Some programs are more works of art than others. Mine for example

[hyatt]

Something else:
the comparison that some pals here has made with writing books and music is wrong, I think. Both music and books are objects of art and for them applied different rules. The value of a piece of art is its entirety, its total shape as such and NOT,as in technical artifacts, an output.
If I take some technological commodities already known and I produce with them something capable of a better output you are doing what science and technology does and cannot but do.
A work of art is valuable by itself, not as an eventual tool for doing something better. Maths are tools, law of physics are a tool, a wheel is a tool, a piece of code is a tool.
Symphony 41 by Mozart is not. If you take a piece of it to write your own symphony, that is plagiarism. What I can take is music technique as such. I can use chromatic scales, B flat chords, etc. But I cannot take a piece of music from score 123 to 345.
In the case of chess programming, not because the code is "written" it is a piece of art like a chapter of Dostoevsky. It is a technical device that many times reproduces an already known device to get something done. Like bit boards, etc.
I agree that if you copy entirely the code clearly your are cloning., but if you take it just as a tool for something clearly different and even better, that is another ball game.

In any case a fussy issue

Fern

it is nothing like writing a book.

With a book, the author writes it and the reader sees what is written and interprets it.

With a program, the author writes it and the reader sees only the output. It would only be a book if the author published the entire source.

You are right btw, there's very little new under the sun

DO not agree with that reasoning. The author writes a program, and the reader _does_ interpret the program, with "a little help from an assistant known as a microprocessor." Or are you saying you can write a book, I can read it verbally and record it, and then sell the recording as an original work? Even if my "reading" is not always "word for word" but has some added expressiveness included?

the 'reader' interprets the OUTPUT of the program, everything else is hidden to him. And no, I am not saying the blah-blah you're asking me above.

Some programs have more artistic outputs than others. Some programs are more works of art than others. Mine for example

Of course, _some_ also intentionally obfuscate their output so that it is difficult to interpret. Fake node counts. Fake search depths. Etc. All in an attempt to hide the internal details. Others then look at the internal details to see what is going on. Sound familiar?