BALDWIN@mit-xx.arpa (Robert W. Baldwin) (03/19/86)
According to the recent posting, a copyright grants the author exclusive rights over the reproduction of derivative works (i.e., screen plays from novels). Does this cover translating a program from one programming language to another? At the risk of openning a can of worms, I will also ask whether it matters if the translation is done by a person or a program. The program could be a compiler or it could be a converter from Pascal to C. -------
sirbu@gauss.ece.cmu.edu (Marvin Sirbu) (03/19/86)
Yes, the original program author has rights over translated versions. See the column on this subject in the March issue of IEEE Communications Magazine.
ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) (03/21/86)
> According to the recent posting, a copyright grants the author > exclusive rights over the reproduction of derivative works (i.e., > screen plays from novels). Does this cover translating a program >from one programming language to another? > > At the risk of openning a can of worms, I will also ask whether > it matters if the translation is done by a person or a program. The > program could be a compiler or it could be a converter from Pascal to C. Since the copyright law covers translating a literary work from, say, French to English, I'm sure it similarly covers translating a copyrighted program from Pascal to C. I can't imagine it would make any difference whether the translation is done by a human or a machine.
tenney@well.UUCP (Glenn S. Tenney) (03/22/86)
There was some article a while ago that discussed the question of
whether a conversion from one computer language to another really is
a translation in the Copyright Law sense. If you believe that it is
(and this is not clear), then the compilation from source code to
object code would be a translation. Please think about it, it is
not obvious that a binary object file of a C program is a translation
of the expression of an idea. In one sense I think it is, but there
really is nothing at all obviously similar between the two. Are there
any cases to decide this issue?
-- Glenn Tenney
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