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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

#31

Post by Phil987 »

pyb wrote: post #12

"The expert witness circuit is surely tempting for many academics, since a distinguished expert can get paid $600+ an hour to prepare a weighty report that supports a lawyer’s case. I don’t have any issue with that, but testifying in court as an expert should be as much a part of your permanent public record as the journal papers you publish. In many cases, the consequences are significant. There should be a danger t…

I don't see where you get that he's threatening the expert witness. He obviously thinks that the expert witness knowingly presented "evidence" that they should know is bogus and is intended to sway the layman jurors who don't know any better. He thinks there should be consequences for such behavior.

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

#32

Post by AnimalMuppet »

pyb wrote: post #12

"The expert witness circuit is surely tempting for many academics, since a distinguished expert can get paid $600+ an hour to prepare a weighty report that supports a lawyer’s case. I don’t have any issue with that, but testifying in court as an expert should be as much a part of your permanent public record as the journal papers you publish. In many cases, the consequences are significant. There should be a danger t…

If the "expert witness" is either lying (in court) or incompetent, shouldn't there be consequences to their professional reputation? Or do you think such things should be consequence-free?

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

#33

Post by trendia »

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.

You wouldn't literally mutate the AST, you would rewrite the code so that it performs the same output but using different code.

Suppose there is a function y = f(x). You would write a different function g(x) such that g(x) = f(x) for every x, but such that the AST of g is different than the AST of f. You'd probably have to do this manually.

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

#34

Post by 6stringmerc »

An interesting statement on things that may be relevant in the grand scheme of the trial, but, unless I'm really missing something here, the verdict was about busting an NDA (the Code being downstream of the NDA violation). Hence the $500M vs the $4B in damages. If it was just about code, then I'm sure Carmack's points would hold up just as well as they read in hindsight. But - and it's a big but - keep in mind his post is in a vacuum of sorts by not relating it back to the mechanics of how the case was actually ruled. Again, I might be missing something in his post, but I don't think so.

As for this part:

>The notion of non-literal copying is probably delicious to many lawyers, since a sufficient application of abstraction and filtering can show that just about everything is related. There are certainly some cases where it is true, such as when you translate a book into another language, but copyright explicitly does not apply to concepts or algorithms, so you can’t abstract very far from literal copying before comparing. As with many legal questions, there isn’t a bright clear line where you need to stop.

Non-literal copying is why I like the "Gaye Family vs. Blurred Lines" verdict and why a wide swath of business folks and industry creatives hate it. Also, it's nearly a 1:1 if you want to talk about Code like Carmack does or Music like Musicians do. It's a totally reasonable thought experiment for one side to claim "Well, a jury of non-musicians ruled the wrong way and called it derivative" to which I'd counter "Well, a jury of expert musicians would probably rule the same way because they understand the nuances even better than the average lay person." Again, these are hypothetical arguments with real-world consequences, but I don't think these cases can be easily ruled upon. There's always going to be some hard feelings at the end of it.

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

#35

Post by gravypod »

Filligree wrote: post #26
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…

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 down into their simplest form and represent them clearly and consisely.

Frankly for him it's exactly what he's paid to do.

> There is no law of nature stating that the maximum complexity anyone can invent is smaller than the complexity the average person can understand.

Unless you think you, or this hypothetical person, is so unbelievably smart that they can operate on a plane so far above that of the common man that they can't explain what they do up there. Then I can see how you can think that way. I personally don't belive that is the case.

We as programmers don't do that and very few people do. For example, lets ask this question:

How do you advocate for funding for the job you do? You need to market yourself. How do the people you market to market to their bosses?

It's not PhDs all the way down the same way it's not turtles all the way down. There is a simple, consise, and understandable explination for every activity that humanity has done since the beginning of time. Wheather I know how to formulate it is one thing but one must exist.

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

#36

Post by madgar »

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…

> 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?

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

#37

Post by Retric »

Filligree wrote: post #26
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…

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.

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

#38

Post by erikbye »

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…

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...

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

#39

Post by jjawssd »

Filligree wrote: post #26
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…

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.

Because the verdict boils down to something simple: guilty or not guilty. To get to that conclusion requires the distillation of complex circumstances into a simple binary outcome.

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

#40

Post by Arathorn »

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 lawyers find themselves painting a more subjective simplified story that the audience may relate to... at which point you have to fight like with like. It's almost a post-truth kind of situation; the actual reality is irrelevant; it's instead how well the theatrical posturing is executed or how compelling the simplified version of the story is.

That said, I have no idea whether Carmack is in the right or wrong here. In my instance the system worked in my favour, but I suspect it had a lot more to do with having lawyers who were good at debating than the almost incidental fact that objectively and demonstrably I had done nothing wrong...

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