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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>If you copy an API but change the words using a thesaurus you are still copying it so it would still be infringement.

From the previous thread I referred to, a commenter cited an excerpt from a circuit court opinion about alternative naming :

[...] Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages. As the district court recognized, moreover, "the Android method and class names could have been different from the names of their counterparts in Java and still have worked." Copyrightability Decision, 872 F. Supp. 2d at 976. [...]

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If I take a book, say Harry Potter, and use a thesaurus to change words to their synonyms in the hopes of avoiding copyright, no court is going to agree that I can now publish Barry Otter and the Association of the Eagle as my own creation.

I don't know if that's true. At least it you wrote a story which is almost exactly like Harry Potter from scratch, without referencing the original and with none of the original characters, I don't believe this would be an issue under current copyright rules.

But you won't. I don't think the law cares about hypothetical occurrences that have probability less than 10^-100000000000.

That's true, but not relevant to the point of the comment you are replying to. Taking a copy of an existing work, and simply replacing words with synonyms and renaming characters would still count as copying. Maybe there would be enough creativity in your choice of synonyms to make your work separately copyrightable as a derivative work, but that would still require permission of the existing work's copyright owner.

Producing a new work that happens to be similar to, or even word for word identical to an existing work, if you truly created it yourself from scratch without taking anything from the existing work, would not be copying.

As a practical matter, unless you had extraordinary proof that you really had never read Harry Potter books, watched the movies, read the plot summaries on Wikipedia, attended a party shortly after one of the books came out where everyone was talking about it, you would lose in a copyright infringement lawsuit. If you work is very similar to Harry Potter and you had access to Harry Potter, that's sufficient for the plaintiff to make their case, switching the burden to you to prove that you did not copy it.

A book is subject to veru different considerations - it has a plot, main characters, and other characteristics that you would be copying. All of these are a protected product of the author's creativity.

There is no plot in an API, no main characters, etc. It communicates matters of technical nature, and there aren't five different way of writing 'sqrt()' or whatever. It is more appropriately compares to architechtural blueprints and other technical documents.

My vague recollection of this case is that Oracle was kind of up a creek with the "java.lang.Math.max" argument, because max() itself is such a well-understood mathematical function and has been defined in numerous programming languages before Java. This put some constraints on Oracle, and thus "the name is the copyrightable contribution" became their (weak) argument. This does not necessarily mean that changing the function name (as opposed to calling interface and interface organization) would have been sufficient to avoid copyright infringement in every case (in Oracle's opinion.)

Using the district court's "java.lang.Math.max" example, Oracle explains that the developers could have called it any number of things, including "Math.maximum" or "Arith.larger." This was not a situation where Oracle was selecting among preordained names and phrases to create its packages.

Which is amusing, because Sun almost certainly chose "max" in part for "compatibility" with the C standard library.

Scratch the "almost", the developer of java.lang.Math explicitly said in one of the briefs that he did it for exactly that reason.

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