Re: Derivative Licensing Question

mm0fmf <none@invalid.com> wrote:

Consider the following situation....
 
Someone has published all the source for a project in C on GitHub.
There is no licence statement, just a copyright notice with the date and
author's name.
 
If I take the source and clone the functions so they have the same
prototypes but write them in assembler and have the same flow, is this a
derivative work?  Or is the assembler version my work to licence how I
feel?
 
What do people think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

"1.  The nature of the copyrighted work: Breyer's analysis identified that
APIs served as declaring code rather than implementation, and that in
context of copyright, it served an "organization function" similar to the
Dewey Decimal System, in which fair use is more applicable."

In that case Google outright copied the code and mechanically stripped out
everything but the prototypes, so in your example the link is even less
strong.

Other jurisdictions may have differing opinions.

Theo