Comment by autarch
5 years ago
> I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public.
That's not true. This depends entirely on the license of the relevant (repl.it) GitHub projects that the author is referencing. I don't know of any open source license that allows you to copy & modify code but somehow forbids you from reusing intangible design elements.
This case is a little confusing, since it sounds like a case of simply producing a similar result _without_ copying any code from the repl.it repo. But given that you can copy the code to get the same result (again, assuming a FOSS license), I don't see how the license could forbid someone from using the same design _without_ copying code. But IANAL.
> again, assuming a FOSS license
replit is not open source though. Only some parts of it are.
You can infringe copyright without copy-pasting code. If I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, burn my only copy of the book, then write and publish Jerry Schmotter and the Alchemist's Gem, a novel about a teenage boy with a star-shaped scar, etc., I'm probably infringing copyright even if I didn't word-for-word copy any part of a Harry Potter book.
There's a reason why "clean room" design exists; to maximally protect yourself against claims of infringement, you want the implementers of your copycat product to not even have seen the original implementation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Copy-pasted code is a smoking gun but it's not necessary.
(I really have no idea if replit would have a case though. Seems dubious. But generally Copyright law is murkier than what some programmers think.)
I understand all that. The author claimed that all of the relevant design elements were part of repl.it's open source projects on GitHub.
That's not what I understood form the blog. I interpreted this:
> Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any kind of secret.
to mean some similarities are explained by a public blog post, not by a repo. A public blog post does not give you license to copy something.
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