John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
1–10 of 322 posts
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#2Well, who was the expert witness?
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#3Loser's lament.
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#4Isn't the testimony already a matter of public record?
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#5This 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 be a large task, but one that might be easier and preferred to writing code from scratch, since you drastically reduce the trial and error process of writing code in a field where best practices aren't currently known.
But, while it's possible to game any 'objective' metric like AST distance, maybe that's preferable to the subjective and incentivized claims of an expert witness, who will be biased in favor of the party paying them. And while it's easy to get lost in the paragraphs of expert witness testimony, a collection of objective metrics is easy to compare to previous cases.
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#6This 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…
Someone should write a script which takes any code and mucks the AST.
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#7I often wonder if John was involved with the story telling aspect of his games, not just the code.
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#8Link doesn't work for me, I just get a popup telling me to sign up to Facebook, and when I close it the page is blank?
EDIT: Incognito mode fixed it. http://pastebin.com/KxAyvqyM
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#9Isn't the testimony already a matter of public record?
He mentions that it's not.
"... his expert testimony in trial is under seal, rather than in the public record."
Re: John Carmack on expert witnesses and 'non literal' copying
#10I 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 each side can make incredibly complex things comprehensible and convincing without any real understanding of the underlying principles in the field.
It seems likely that the best expert witness in this case is not the most correct or credentialed, but the most charismatic.
It would be interesting to see how some of these big software trials (Google v Oracle) would have come out if the jury were made up of people who were both impartial and familiar with the industry.