John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying • Hacker News Board

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#61

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #50

dragonwriter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is already a consequence to lying as a witness, it's called perjury prosecution. It's unfortunately infrequently pursued when the perjury occurs in a civil case, but if you want to agitate for consequences, agitate for prosecutors willing to enforce the law. (Or for a civil cause of action for perjury, but that would have to be carefully crafted to prevent an infinite regress of lawsuits.)

> There is already a consequence to lying as a witness, it's called perjury prosecution. Except that this is an " expert witness ", and not a regular witness. The expert witness offers his/her opinions.

A statement about one's own opinion can be materially false, and provably (in the sense the word applies in the legal system) so.

Certainly, an attorney can (and this is true of any witness, not just expert witness) coordinate with a witness on a line of questioning which carefully avoids any questions where perjury would be necessary to avoid damaging the case. That's why we have witnesses subject to examinstion by opposing counsel, as well.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#62

Post by dpark » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:18 PM UTC

pseudometa wrote: post #22

addisonj wrote: post #10

I don't have the evidence so I can't make a judgement about whether Zenimax or Carmack is in the wrong here, but this does point out something strange in our court system and that is where a "jury of peers" which translates to normal people with little to no knowledge of the underlying subject matter. As our society becomes more specialized it seems a bit absurd to have people make judgements mostly based on how well…

Sitting on a jury yourself should alleviate you from worries about jurors not being experts themselves. Jurors are not experts in law, yet every case they sit on the lawyers bring in people to educate the jurors on the law and all aspects that pertain to a case. It is incredibly educational sitting on a jury.

Jurors are not expected to actually learn anything about the law. In fact they are told that they are not deciding or interpreting the law. Juries are finders of facts and the relevant law snippets and their interpretations are given to them by the judge. (Actually if I recall correctly, my jury wasn't even given the actual law text excerpts. Just the plaintext interpretation of them.)

It can be interesting going through the process as a juror but I didn't find that I learned much about the law as a result.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#63

Post by cannonpr » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:18 PM UTC

Avenger42 wrote: post #47

ue_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very common argument against juries, and I think it's one of the most powerful. Of course if you start to fill a jury with people competent in the area being judged, you run different risks, such as bias within the field. And it's still not clear that it would help with delivering justice. But if we take the idea of a jury to be about judging by one's peers, it should be patently clear (heh) that the jury o…

Ignoring the idea of a corporation being judged by other corporations, the idea that "peers" should be judged more strictly (i.e., limited to "people in similar situations" monetarily, professionally, etc.), I feel like you would run a very clear risk of creating juries that function similarly to "good-old-boy networks" that are unwilling to judge too harshly.

This risk is very evident in medical review boards for doctors and several similar boards for lawyers and judges across various countries.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#64

Post by jononor » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:19 PM UTC

trendia wrote: post #5

This struck out at me: > There are objective measures of code similarity that can be quoted, like the edit distance between abstract syntax trees ... If this became the primary legal metric, then programmers who stole code would change the code so that functions achieved the same output with practically no AST similarity. That is, they could maximize functional similarity while minimzing code similarity. This would b…

Copyright does not protect the functional aspects, only the "expressive" ones. IANAL though.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#65

Post by bshimmin » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

erikbye wrote: post #38

gravypod wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how removed someone is from your field of expertise you should be able to consisely make a case for why you aren't at fault and why. You should also be able to demonstrate using basic logic that the simplest components of two source trees (something that is extremely basic) can show resemblance to another extremely basic component. For example the similarity of example code. How many example source files ha…

Average Joe does not know what source code is, nor is he able to tell one piece of source code or one programming language apart from another, it is all gibberish to probably the majority of the jury. Hell, a few years back most Americans did not know that McDonald's was unhealthy, they had to be told this...

Let me share a conversation I had with a family friend a bit ago:

she peers over my shoulder at my monitor, which has (let's say) a screenful of some Ruby on Rails app in Sublime Text

Her: "Is that... code?"

Me: "Yep, that's right. It's the code for a web site."

Her: "Wow, your code is so beautiful!"

Me (surprised): "Really? What makes you say that?"

Her: "All those lovely colours! I didn't know you were so artistic - did you do the colours yourself?"

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#66

Post by geofft » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #37

Filligree wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Why is there an assumption that you can explain anything to anyone? There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand.

Do you have an actual example of this? Contracts get really complex in the same way programs get complex. But, juries have mediated contract disputes for a very long time.

Only because judges get to tell the jury what certain phrases in the contract mean, because judges are experts at understand contract complexity. We don't actually expect juries to learn contract law; the judge interprets the relevant parts of the contract for the jury, and tells the jury to decide whether it was broken.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#67

Post by nazka » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

addisonj wrote: post #10

I don't have the evidence so I can't make a judgement about whether Zenimax or Carmack is in the wrong here, but this does point out something strange in our court system and that is where a "jury of peers" which translates to normal people with little to no knowledge of the underlying subject matter. As our society becomes more specialized it seems a bit absurd to have people make judgements mostly based on how well…

It is true and it would help to have a jury that has the technical background of the subject. On a note though unfortunately even with a jury like that, it doesn't resolve the problems for preferences and bias that someone can have. We still have "wars" over Go vs Scala or React vs Angular.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#68

Post by grovegames » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #23

addisonj wrote: post #10

I don't have the evidence so I can't make a judgement about whether Zenimax or Carmack is in the wrong here, but this does point out something strange in our court system and that is where a "jury of peers" which translates to normal people with little to no knowledge of the underlying subject matter. As our society becomes more specialized it seems a bit absurd to have people make judgements mostly based on how well…

No matter how removed someone is from your field of expertise you should be able to consisely make a case for why you aren't at fault and why. You should also be able to demonstrate using basic logic that the simplest components of two source trees (something that is extremely basic) can show resemblance to another extremely basic component. For example the similarity of example code. How many example source files ha…

If this were true of human nature, we would not have creationism.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#69

Post by toufka » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:20 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #46

gravypod wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how removed someone is from your field of expertise you should be able to consisely make a case for why you aren't at fault and why. You should also be able to demonstrate using basic logic that the simplest components of two source trees (something that is extremely basic) can show resemblance to another extremely basic component. For example the similarity of example code. How many example source files ha…

How much time does it take to understand something with sufficient depth to make a sound judgement? It would be nice if the answer could somehow always be a short expert witness testimony, but the reality seems to be that in some areas it's months or years of study. In your example, you'd have to explain what source code is, what a graphics library is, methods of representing and comparing source code, and how the ap…

That's precisely why the experts are asked their opinion. And a jury takes that opinion into account.

"Dr. Soandso, do you believe, based on your experience, that such an action would constitute a flagrant abuse? Of a kind that is unprecedented? And such an action would damage the reputation of many, you say? And were such an action to take place it would cause harm to the industry for decades?"

The jury needn't be an expert to make sound judgements. Expert witnesses do actually need to socially regarded as experts, and lawyers on both sides of this adversarial system should do everything they can to undermine those experts who are not impartial. And if each player in that system does their job well a layman should certainly be able to make a reasonably founded decision.

Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

#70

Post by TheCoelacanth » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

sfifs wrote: post #29

The problem for John Camack was I think he was on both sides of the table writing code - so he wrote the code at Zenimax & re-wrote the code at Oculus. From a layman's perspective, he very well could have been "copying". Normally when you design clean room implementations, you use different people and make sure that the people who write the code never see the prior written code and the person giving the spec doesn't…

That seems like it is saying that Zenimax owns not only the code Carmack wrote while he was there, but also the knowledge and experience he gained while working there.