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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

#111

Post by rayiner »

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.

Yes, a suit for fraud against a bank would have to have a jury composed of bankers, etc.

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

#112

Post by whyileft »

Bamafan wrote: post #95
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 C…

"non-literal" copying is garbage. We already have a legal term. Its called a derivative work. Which is what taking a Harry Potter book and changing the names of the characters is.

Lawyers create new terms like that to intentionally make it difficult to apply previous case law to the case at hand. Both for the opposing lawyers and any judges on appeal.

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

#113

Post by intherdfield »

pyb wrote: post #28
perfmode wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John makes a good point. Here, transparency appears to be in truth's best interest.

From the downvotes, sounds like I'm the only one who is shocked by this.

Could you explain why you think this is a threat aimed at the expert witness in this trial?

Any time someone publishes a work, they are putting their reputation at risk. If the work is bad, the whole world will know they did it. Carmack is saying he thinks this should be the case for reports and analyses given by expert witnesses.

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

#114

Post by sqeaky »

toufka wrote: post #69
nitwit005 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

But then aren't you just expecting the Jury to trust the expert?

How does the Jury tell two experts apart, while one says Yes and the other No?

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

#115

Post by 794CD01 »

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.

No, it's more than Zenimax owns not only the code Carmack wrote while he was there, but also the design on which that code was based. If there were literal design documents written up, I think we would all agree that is clearly true. When the designs are all in one person's head, it becomes gray enough to take to court.

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

#116

Post by beachy »

Arathorn wrote: post #40

Having gone through a similar trial, this is painfully familiar. The reality seems to be that the legal process optimises for whoever argues the most manipulatively (using every dirty trick in the book) rather than actually optimising for truth. Perhaps this is inevitable: rather than hoping to successfully convey a logical scientific argument to the judge/jury/arbitrator about a deeply technical area, instead the la…

Absolutely concur. In an arbitration case, our attorney told us beforehand that (pardon the language) "the only bigger whores than lawyers are expert witnesses".

The outcomes seem to depend mainly on, as you say, which side can spin the most compelling simplified story that resonates with the arbitrator/jury.

As another poster says, perhaps use of analogies should be banned (Harry Potter in this case for goodness sake).

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

#117

Post by sqeaky »

dragonwriter wrote: post #109
dpark wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

> Jurors are not expected to actually learn anything about the law Since jury instructions both ask for a determination of whether a particular legal standard was met (phrased in legal terms), and explanation of what facts (in lay terms) the jury must find to say that that standard was met, I think your statement is not completely accurate.

I think the system is not completely accurate.

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

#118

Post by TeMPOraL »

rayiner wrote: post #98
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…

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…

I feel if the devs were worth any salt, they'd clearly smell the bullshit. Just because you can do fancy math and turn one thing into another, doesn't mean it's what actually happened.

Experienced developers should also easily recognize that two independently developed codebases may end up pretty similar at places simply because of the problem domain. There's for instance only so many ways you can structure the rendering code in your game efficiently.

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

#120

Post by efraim »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Interesting rant on expert witnesses. Mostly interesting because I've done some expert witness testimony and found it fascinating. I completely resonate with John's issue with the expert's testimony and his understanding of it. John mentioned that their own expert testified differently but he didn't say whether or not their lawyers attempted to impeach their expert with cross examination. In the two cases I participa…

>And, like John, I consider the notion of 'non-literal copying' to be pretty ridiculous.

What about translating from one language to another, like in Carmack's book example? You can't literally copy from c++ to Java, but it can look pretty similar. Would that be considered copyright infringement?

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