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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

#291

Post by rasz_pl »

Ygg2 wrote: post #191
jonknee wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Carmack intentionally destroyed data on his computer after he got notice of this litigation and right after he researched on Google how to wipe a hard drive Somehow I think John knows how to wipe a drive...

Every dev knows how to wipe a drive. Buy an identical drive. Throw old drive into the incinerator.

Lack of history is a clue system was wiped or reinstalled from scratch.

Its very difficult to make windows appear to be an old actively used install. Encase (or new software, I havent done forensic for >6 years now) will tell you everything about timestamps and what that means.

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

#292

Post by didibus »

Does this mean if I write code that does X at company A, and then move to company B and am asked to write code that does X, I would be copyright infringing my own code I wrote at company A unless I purposely went out of my way to write it completly differently?

Because chances are I still remember how I did it, or even if I don't, chances are I'll come up with pretty much the same way, as it's inherent to my code style and thought process.

I guess it's something I'll be taking great care in doing if this ever happens to me.

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

#293

Post by erikbye »

bshimmin wrote: post #65
erikbye wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right.

Actually had something similar happen. An acquaintance of mine glanced at a monitor with Sublime and Monokai theme (don't like it, just happened to be on) and went "Wow, that looks really heavy [as in complicated], cool colors too!" Obviously it was nothing "heavy", just code, but all code would have looked complicated to him.

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

#294

Post by erikbye »

josu wrote: post #79
erikbye wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To further your point, the expert had to use Harry Potter as an analogy. In my opinion, analogies should be banned from courtrooms. They are fine for casual discussions, but they are often misleading.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/1999/jun/23/microsoft...

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

#295

Post by seanp2k2 »

true_religion wrote: post #283
majormajor wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you want to commit crime, you'd move to a neighborhood with a lot of criminals who will be likely to give you a pass? Specializing the "peer" criteria seems to run big risks of having people judged by a group of peers who may all disagree with certain laws .

That was the idea behind 'jury of your peers'. If you're a starving peasant, who poaches on the King's land, do you want the jury to be filled with other starving peasants who poach for survival or aristocrats who cannot understand why you have robbed them of a chance to hunt pheasant next feast day?

If you're a peasant, your peers would be the other peasants. If you're an aristocrat, your peers would also be. IMO it doesn't make sense to have random laypersons decide highly technical cases over what are many times pedantic disputes. They won't understand and they don't care, but they're in charge of deciding, and their decisions can have widespread repercussions.

I agree that having a jury of 10 random software developers deciding Oracle vs Google would more than a little biased (APIs being copyrightable), but I think that it would largely be a good thing -- professionals who actually know about this stuff would be making the decisions. Luckily for everyone, they were able to dumb it down enough for the jury to understand, but not all cases are so lucky. I just chose this example because many people on here are likely to remember this case, even though it doesn't really illustrate my point that random citizens deciding technical cases is IMO not the best solution.

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

#296

Post by seanp2k2 »

in_cahoots wrote: post #157
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'm glad you changed your mind. The corrolary to this is to suggest that uneducated or unprincipled defendants should be tried by an uneducated, unprincipled jury. Everyone deserves access to an informed jury, regardless of the exact definition of 'peer'.

Everyone deserves that; I agree. How many actually receive that, though? From what I've seen, juries are mostly composed of people who are most interested in getting out of jury duty by reaching a verdict quickly. The one person who holds out for justice because they give a damn is typically put under immense peer pressure to cave so everyone else can go home.

A good idea in theory, but in practice, many jurors are lazy and apathetic IMO.

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

#297

Post by seanp2k2 »

Avenger42 wrote: post #76
jbooth wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd settle for not actively weeding out experts as we do in the current voir dire process.

The issue with having experts on the jury is twofold: - If they're experts in the field, they may have had enough interaction with the case in question (or the people involved in the case) to have formed an opinion without having heard any testimony - Due to their expertise, the jury could decide "it's easier (more convenient, more likely to be correct, etc) to defer to the expert" and just vote whichever way the exp…

I'd like to believe that that's true, but from what I've seen, it more often turns into a battle of personalities within and without the jury. "[they] look guilty!" or just thinking a person is slimy / deserving of punishment, among the less racist reasons.

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

#298

Post by gregw2 »

k-t wrote: post #287
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…

Carmack didn't write any of the code that Zenimax claimed was derived from what he'd written at id. He hasn't done any work on the PC side at all. That's one of many messed up things about this case. When Zenimax sued Oculus they assumed Carmack had been working as part of the existing Oculus team, but he'd actually started up an entirely separate project, working with Samsung on mobile VR, it just hadn't been announ…

Wow

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

#299

Post by seanp2k2 »

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…

In this case, I do believe that Carmack is so intelligent and so far removed from a random citizen when it comes to graphics engines that it would take probably thousands of hours for a normal person to actually understand what was happening here, if they even cared, which they would not. "So let's start with a voxel"... [much time passes] "so for the sake of making the rendering pipeline efficient, its common to ..."

Without any sort of grasp on the range of solutions for the piece of this system in question, I find it absurd that a normal citizen would be tasked with ruling on this.

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

#300

Post by seanp2k2 »

sqeaky wrote: post #254
Retric wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if a group of experts might chose A 55% of the time and B 45% of the time then a 50/50 random outcome is not a real issue. A few places have elections where in case a tie they do a coin flip. The important thing is to remove bias not get extreme accuracy. As to our court cases being biased for the wealthy that's a little more systemic than just highly technical cases. Even in clear cut cases having a competent…

Clearly we aren't running in circles! I agree that those coinflip cases exist, but if cases are so close a coinflips (or elections) can decide them then why do sums like $500 million depend on them as in the article? A system which promotes charisma instead of factual accuracy doesn/t just result in muddy grey areas where things were already close. Things like climate change, which pretty much all experts agree on, a…

The problem in your last sentence is the trick, one which humanity has yet to solve in any sort of sustainable way. Maybe strong AI can finally save us from ourselves.
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