Hollaar@UTAH-20.ARPA (Lee Hollaar) (03/19/86)
From the 1976 Copyright Act (Section 101): "A 'derivative work' is a work based upon one of more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a 'derivative work'." Translations are clearly derivative works, although the authors of the Copyright Act were undoubtedly thinking about more conventional (English to German, rather than Pascal to C) translations. Nothing is said about how such translation is performed, although it is likely that a court would hold that a work translated from English to German by a computer would be a derivative work. The gray area (and every good legal question lives in a gray area) is how similar to the original work something needs to be to be considered a derivative work. Clearly, a direct translation would be a derivative work, while a work based on the knowledge gained by a careful examination of an original program, but not copying any specific part of it, would not (since copyright doesn't protect the underlying ideas). -------