Path: ...!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!not-for-mail From: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Derivative Licensing Question Date: 22 Mar 2025 09:26:26 GMT Organization: Stefan Ram Lines: 34 Expires: 1 Mar 2026 11:59:58 GMT Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: news.uni-berlin.de Uv2jnwScDVmf4O+TlwDkRwfPrkQLxDbDqGz1kpnGnYT2GU Cancel-Lock: sha1:/knLUKCsKSldE5d+3udoIHijt/Q= sha256:ED5loJV8imm7B7kYASrFvQeU4hpxmxYUpDsCcvWPwU4= X-Copyright: (C) Copyright 2025 Stefan Ram. All rights reserved. Distribution through any means other than regular usenet channels is forbidden. It is forbidden to publish this article in the Web, to change URIs of this article into links, and to transfer the body without this notice, but quotations of parts in other Usenet posts are allowed. X-No-Archive: Yes Archive: no X-No-Archive-Readme: "X-No-Archive" is set, because this prevents some services to mirror the article in the web. But the article may be kept on a Usenet archive server with only NNTP access. X-No-Html: yes Content-Language: en-US Bytes: 2479 mm0fmf wrote or quoted: >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? "Writing them in assembler with the same flow" might be nothing more than compiling and disassembling. You also could ask an AI chatbot to write code for you. AFAIK this can be used by you as if it was not coprighted. I sometimes wonder about copright when you copy and then change. Say, you copy this copyrighted program: A = 2 . (It's too short to be copyrighted, but it serves here to represent a much longer piece of code.) You make a little change to it: B = 2 . Later you change it into: B = 7 . Now your program clearly has nothing to do with the original anymore. You just used that to get started but then gradually transformed it into your own code. So, is "B = 7" now free from any copyright of the original author of "A = 2"? At what point during the transition exactly did the copyright disappear?