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John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying

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

#91

Post by leggomylibro »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #70
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.

I think it's more that Zenimax thinks it owns the unique ideas that Carmack, a top talent in his field, created while he was working there. They're not angry that he wrote the same 4x4 matrix inverse function for both them and Oculus.

Or more specifically, if Zenimax's claims are correct, while he was working on company time and equipment.

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

#92

Post by madgar »

johnbellone wrote: post #53
madgar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the limit it means "you read this code, understood how it worked, and wrote new code that could do the same function." You can stretch that to cover anything you have ever seen. Which is sad. I thought the industry adopted "clean room" techniques decades ago to avoid this kind of appearance of impropriety. It's more expensive, sure, but isn't eliminating legal risk something that typically gets paid for?

This particular point worries me. Are we now not going to be able to make a clean room re-implementation of concept? Do we need to worry about our previous employer suing us because we are successful?

They didn't seem to do clean room here. Seems like Carmack was wrote code for both companies which is the exact opposite of clean room.

(Please correct me if I misunderstood the facts of the case)

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

#93

Post by noblethrasher »

barrkel wrote: post #27
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…

If you're genuinely mutating the AST, you'll end up with a different program that does something different or performs differently. There's only so many ways you can write a loop and they all look loop-like, whether it's for / while / do / tail recursion. But if you have a program that doesn't contain a loop at that point at all, or loops over something different, then you've got a different program.

> If you're genuinely mutating the AST, you'll end up with a different program that does something different or performs differently.

If the original program was written in, say, F# and used a lot of pattern matching, then you could rewrite a straightforward moral equivalent in C# that used lots of visitors. Both the AST and IL will be substantially different, but the performance and functionality will be similar.

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

#94

Post by perlgeek »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #83

This is a thorny issue because say you could make the argument that if I spend 5 years writing and rewriting code from 0.1 to 0.8 at company A to understand a domain, then I move to company B and write 0.9 and 1.0 in the same domain and make a pile of $$$, then company A should somehow be compensated even if the code itself is not exactly the same (which it wouldn't be since you learned from mistakes made). On the ot…

The issue of potential IP transfer is why companies sometimes include non-compete clauses in their employment contracts.

I don't know if they can be enforced in the relevant jurisdictions though.

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

#95

Post by Bamafan »

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…

FB post is solely about "literal" vs "non-literal" code copying. These are words that the lawyers chose to use to communicate a complex (for non-programmers) idea to a bunch of non-programmers.

I think of "non-literal" code copying as R&D. I think the Zenimax lawyers were claiming that the R&D that Carmack did for the Occulus, while still an employee of Zenimax, was key to making Occulus valuable. And it seems like Carmack even used Zenimax IP (Doom) to develop a demo that was shown to investors, without Zenimax permission. Essentially Zenimax was used as an R&D arm of Occulus.

Pretty messy case and pretty different from Google vs Oracle IMO.

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

#96

Post by sfifs »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #70
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.

Specifics matter in legal proceedings.

In general, this argument would be laughed out of court of course. However, Carmack worked not only in the same domain, he worked on developing the exact same product at both companies - so this opens up to potential liability.

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

#97

Post by sandworm101 »

Too many people read too much into "peers". These are your legal peers, not social or educational equivalents. These are fellow citizens. So long as they arent royals, elected officials or cops they are peers. (Lawyers can technically serve on juries but every court i know doesnt want them to do so, nor law students.) We live now in a society with fewer official class systems, or we at least now better separate legal classes, and so easily forget the original intention of such words.

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

#98

Post by rayiner »

ue_ wrote: post #25
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…

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…

Would a jury of technically-minded people have helped here? Put aside the natural bias that software developers would have to be skeptical of any claims against a company with which John Carmack is involved. Now, you're trying to sell the story that Code B is a copy of Code A, even though they don't look the same, because of fancy math. Is that harder to sell to a jury of software developers than a jury of ordinary people, or easier?

As someone who knows you can identify similarities between seemingly dissimilar text using mathematical analysis, I feel like it'd be easier to convince me that there was "non-literal copying."

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

#99

Post by ISL »

foldr wrote: post #89
ISL wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once espoused a similar opinion, but have since changed my mind. I'm a physicist, and once expressed to a judge I had met on the trail that I wished I could be judged by my academic peers. It was my belief that they would be more receptive to logical argument, understanding in their analysis, and more committed to fundamental principles. The judge was visibly surprised, but said little. What later changed my mind w…

> I wished I could be judged by my academic peers. It was my belief that they would be more receptive to logical argument, understanding in their analysis, and more committed to fundamental principles. Have you met any academics?

Yes.

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

#100

Post by beachy »

gravypod wrote: post #35
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.

I'd say there are very few people who are doing things so out there that they cannot explain what they are doing. We aren't that special. We aren't magical unicors who work in all corners of our galaxy. No we are programmers, PhDs, mechanics, engineers. Our jobs share a lot in common with each other and can be easily broken down to their base components. That's the job of a programmer like Carmack. To break things do…

Spoken like an intellectual (not an insult - an observation).

Could John Carmack explain binary space partitioning in an interesting way that made Joe Average feel like he got it? Most likely yes.

But would Joe Average really "get it"? Could he make a meaningful judgement as to whether some other piece of software implementing BSP was more or less a copy of some other piece? (just using BSP as an example - not a good one)

I sincerely doubt it. As the saying goes, a little knowledge is dangerous.

Look at the number of people who claim that global warming is a myth because they saw a snowstorm last week.

Its fashionable, and feels liberal, to claim that we're all much the same, but we're not. John Carmack is what many would call a genius, who can conceive of things that are simply beyond the ken of the bulk of society.

Sure those people have other skills and virtues - but epecting them to make rational decisions about complex technical matters while two opposing sets of attorneys bark at them is...ridiculous.

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