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

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

#231

Post by shrewduser » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:07 PM UTC

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…

i think it wouldn't be hard to interpret 'jury of peers' as a jury of people made up of those in a particular area.

i feel like we need to make allowances for specialised cases, in this circumstance you may as well be talking in german and expect english speakers to understand what's going on.

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

#232

Post by Lawtonfogle » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:15 PM UTC

cloudkj wrote: post #225

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…

Having just served on a jury, I can say that I've actually gained some confidence in the American justice system and its use of a jury of peers. When it comes down to it, the task for the jury is fairly straightforward, narrow, and well-defined: to examine the facts as laid out in the trial and to objectively execute the law as it is defined at the time while being fair and impartial. Their backgrounds and prior know…

Being on a jury gave me the opposite experience. The guy who slept through parts of the trial was given as equal a say as those who stayed awake and the topic of them sleeping was a joke to many of the jurors. Charisma counted for more than reasoning. It made me have a lot more believe in the statement that the innocent seek trial by judge while the guilty seek trial by jury.

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

#233

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

madgar wrote: post #92

johnbellone wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The employer of John Carmack is buying his work product for as long as he remains an employee. The company cannot buy his knowledge and expertise from him, as that is an integral and indivisible part of him.

So if you hire Carmack to write a rendering engine, then he quits and goes to work for another company, to write a different rendering engine, he is not "copying" the engine you bought. His memories of all the software he had previously written do not belong to you. You cannot contractually obligate him to forget a part of himself that makes him valuable as a software professional.

The work of a software professional is constrained, because while a given mathematical problem may be solved in an infinite number of ways, only a few of those ways will be optimal for any given set of computing conditions. Different implementations may be grouped by algorithm. With respect to computer graphics, all rendering engines will tend to converge on the fastest algorithms for painting pixels on rectangles. Because of this, all rendering engines will be very similar in some respects. But they will also markedly diverge in others.

There are pretty much only 4 types of algorithm: the fast way, the frugal way, the magical way (viz. both fast and frugal, but requires top-level expertise to invent or understand), and the hardware exploit. Carmack is certainly capable of writing magical algorithms. And he can remember how to make the pixie dust. He will also tend to write all his implementations in a similar style.

Thus it is very possible that one person could write identical code at different times, while having no specific memory of the previous time it was written, nor any need to refer to associated documentation around that instance.

The clean room is clean if no property of the other company was ever inside it. Carmack cannot be property, therefore his presence is not a contaminant. My opinion is that any non-disclosure agreement Carmack may have been a party to can only meaningfully cover the contribution of other individuals to the project, since Carmack-qua-Company-A-employee cannot meaningfully wall off knowledge from Carmack-qua-Company-B-employee. If Company A wanted to keep Carmack's raw knowledge and expertise from Company B, they would have had to get him to sign a non-compete agreement (which no one at his level of clout should ever do for less than a significant ownership share in Company A).

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

#234

Post by PeterisP » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC

dpark wrote: post #156

afthonos wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole (original) point though. Historically, people would be taken away from people who had known them all their lives, be accused of something fantastical, and be condemned on the strength of he-said, she-said. In the specific case of the USA, a big complaint of colonists is that they would be whisked back to England for trial ("For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: For transpor…

> Peers are supposed to know you, your character, and your history. I don't think so. It's one thing to say that juries should be made of private citizens drawn from your nation/state/town. It's another thing entirely to say that juries should be made up of your buddies. Peer is not a synonym for neighbor. It means "equal".

They are just as supposed to know the victim, their character, and their history. There's no reason to suppose that a "close peer" jury would favor the defendant, it's just as likely to be the other way around.

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

#235

Post by EdHominem » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #218

EdHominem wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're creative, rather arbitrary designs. Which isn't relevant. Harry Potter is a creative work, including the character names, but the page numbers those characters appear on are not. Similarly, Java is a creative work, and maybe even the interfaces are "creative" in that they aren't totally determined by the domain. But after the fact they're just a listing of resources, like a list of characters in a book. Nob…

An API is not just a "listing of resources."[1] API design often is the most creative part of code. It involves all sorts of creative choices in terms of what abstractions to expose, how to expose them, etc. Take the STL, for example. There is nothing particularly interesting there about the code that does stuff. Oh, it's another red-black tree implementation, yawn . The creativity is all in the API: the container ab…

> I don't get your point about "after the fact.

To pick a name is creative. To use that name afterword is not - it's literally referring to something by its given name.

My mother was being creative, you're just reading my business card.

> Even minor things like order of operands are creative choices.

They can be. But where they're standardized, they aren't.

If the API specifies these things they're now functional.

> An API is not just a "listing of resources.

Actually, that's all it is. The implementation lives somewhere else.

> It involves all sorts of creative choices in terms of what abstractions to expose, how to expose them, etc.

Right, and the API itself is a non-creative listing of them.

I'm not violating copyright by telling you that one of the characters in Harry Potter is named Dumbledore, nor would I be if I listed all the characters and the facts about them, despite that by necessity as a work of fiction they're all creative.

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

#236

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #143

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…

To the last point, courts do actually try to solve this. The goal of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... that gets used is, in fact, to abstract things, eliminate the non-copyrightable parts, and try to see if any important stuff is left. Wikipedia actually has a fairly good explanation of it in practice. So they are actually trying, and the real problem is that existing copyright law,…

> So they are actually trying, and the real problem is that existing copyright law, for literary works, is just not a match for how software tends to actually be developed, which is that "most code is worthless, there is very little that really should be protected".

It's not even that. It's that the debugging is the hard part. The general idea of what the code should do is easy. Getting all the edge cases right is hard.

The result is that a) any two working implementations are going to be functionally equivalent (by tautology, because that's what "working" means), and b) "non-literal copying" doesn't actually help the "infringer" because anything short of literal copying or literal translation (meaning the thing a compiler does), is going to require you to redo the hard part anyway.

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

#237

Post by jandrese » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:31 PM UTC

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…

The non-literal copying thing seems insane to me. It's like solving a math equation, then getting a new job and being told to solve the same equation a completely different way.

Of course the solutions are going to look similar, it's a re-implementation of the same core principles. How far could you go in implementing a VR game if you aren't allowed to use matrix transformations or dot products?

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

#238

Post by jandrese » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #233

madgar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The employer of John Carmack is buying his work product for as long as he remains an employee. The company cannot buy his knowledge and expertise from him, as that is an integral and indivisible part of him. So if you hire Carmack to write a rendering engine, then he quits and goes to work for another company, to write a different rendering engine, he is not "copying" the engine you bought. His memories of all the so…

> The employer of John Carmack is buying his work product for as long as he remains an employee. The company cannot buy his knowledge and expertise from him, as that is an integral and indivisible part of him.

This is the entire point of non-compete agreements. To deny competitors the expertise the person has developed during their time at your company.

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

#239

Post by LeicaLatte » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:36 PM UTC

Strom wrote: post #200

LeicaLatte wrote: post #187

Carmack is a hero for me but he seems to come across as very naive here. I employ other people now and employees who argue this sort of stuff isn't copying are toxic to the culture and ethics of work. When you are paid a salary every month, I actually don't care if you are productive. But the least I expect you to be is loyal. And I am no monster for expecting that.

Loyalty in a free market is a pipe dream. Extremely few employers will stay loyal to their employees when times get rough, say when an employee gets very sick and can't work for several years. Thus no rational person should have any long term loyality to an employer if the market providers better alternatives.

This is a big reason why a US company might prefer immigrant workers. Local workers tend to treat their jobs more as transactions and less like a relationship with their employer. Immigrant workers come with built in motivation to stick to their employers and stay loyal.

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

#240

Post by jandrese » Thu, Feb 02, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #107

hydrogen18 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my thoughts exactly. If what the OP was proposing was not legitimate myself and countless others would be in legal jeopardy. I have written code that does the same thing at numerous employers because I am hired to solve the same problem. This doesn't mean I've copied anything, it just means I know what the hell I am doing. If this was not legal, we would all be bound to the same employer for life. This could…

Not to mention that the Zeni prototype was merely adequate, while the Oculus product is polished. I think that ZeniMax are seriously salty about shoving off VR now that it's blossoming. That being said, working on company equipment during company time? Carmack screwed up.

This argument I don't understand. Carmack was tasked with making a Doom demo for VR, so he did. Why it is such a shocker that he worked on a company project with company time is a mystery to me. He even pushed Zenimax to make a releasable version, but the upper management thought VR was a waste of time which is why he left.