Thread: Re: Copyright and Paper walls (was: Rollback in Postgres)

Re: Copyright and Paper walls (was: Rollback in Postgres)

From
Steve Midgley
Date:
At 11:59 AM 7/12/2008, pgsql-sql-owner@postgresql.org wrote:
>Date: Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:20:37 +0100
>From: Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>
>To: Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org>
>Cc: Lewis Cunningham <lewisc@rocketmail.com>, Scott Marlowe 
><scott.marlowe@gmail.com>, samantha mahindrakar 
><sam.mahindrakar@gmail.com>,  pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
>Subject: Re: Rollback in Postgres
>Message-ID: <1215854437.4051.1723.camel@ebony.2ndQuadrant>
>
>On Sat, 2008-07-12 at 09:40 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 8:56 AM, Simon Riggs 
> <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Please don't put links to copyrighted material on our lists.
> >
> > That's an odd thing to say, given that virtually every link on our
> > lists probably points to material copyrighted in some way.
>
>Prudence is all I ask for. We don't need to provide additional
>advertising for others, nor do we wish to embroil ourselves in
>accusations over copyright violations.

I don't want to pile more wood on the fire, but I think I can see both 
sides to this. I believe this is not so much copyright violation 
concern, but if the Pg team releases some cool feature relating to 
rollbacks down-the-road that is vaguely similar to Oracle's system, 
reducing the amount of discussion about Oracle's features on this list 
would reduce Oracle's ability to claim that the feature was a direct 
appropriation.

That said (and IANAL), I think posting links to for-profit and/or 
copyrighted websites is really important in general for the list. 
There's a lot of good information out there and I think it's not so 
great if this list were to limit itself only to public domain and open 
copyright documentation for consideration.

Just two more cents from the peanut gallery on a Saturday afternoon,

Steve



Re: Copyright and Paper walls

From
John Hasler
Date:
Steve writes:
> I don't want to pile more wood on the fire, but I think I can see both
> sides to this. I believe this is not so much copyright violation concern,
> but if the Pg team releases some cool feature relating to rollbacks
> down-the-road that is vaguely similar to Oracle's system, reducing the
> amount of discussion about Oracle's features on this list would reduce
> Oracle's ability to claim that the feature was a direct appropriation.

So what if it is direct appropriation?  Either it is patented, in which
case you infringe whether you looked at their docs or not, or it isn't, in
which case they have no grounds for action.  There is nothing wrong with
discussing Oracle's features or even deliberately duplicating them.
-- 
John Hasler 
john@dhh.gt.org
Elmwood, WI USA