Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?

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nz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Not all legal systems put the burden of proof on the accuser. In fact, many legal systems have indefinite detentions, in which the government effectively imprisons a suspect, sometimes for months at a time. To take it a step further, the plea-bargain system of the USA, is really just a method to skip the entire legal process. After all, proving guilt is expensive, so why not just strong-arm a suspect into confessing? It also has the benefit of holding someone responsible for an injustice, even if the actual perpetrator cannot be found. By my personal standards, this is a corrupt system, but by the standards of the legal stratum of society, those KPIs look _solid_.

By contrast, in Germany (IIRC), false confessions are _illegal_, meaning that objective evidence is required.

Many legal systems follow the principle of "innocent until proven guilty", but also have many "escape hatches" that let them side-step the actual process that is supposed to guarantee that ideal principle.

EDIT: And that is just modern society. Past societies have had trial by ordeal and trial by combat, neither of which has anything to do with proof and evidence. Many such archaic proof procedures survive in modern legal systems, in a modernized and bureaucratized way. In some sense, modern trials are a test of who has the more expensive attorney (as opposed to who has a more skilled champion or combatant).

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jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, the burden of proof is on the defender: if you didn't create it you are not the copyright holder.

Copyright is automatic for a reason, the simple act of creation is technically enough to establish copyright. But that mechanism means that if your claimed creation has an uncanny resemblance to an earlier, published creation or an unpublished earlier creation that you had access to that you are going to be in trouble when the real copyright holder is coming to call.

In short: just don't. Write your own stuff if you plan on passing it off as your own.

The accuser just needs to establish precedence.

So if you by your lonesome have never listened to the radio and tomorrow morning wake up and 'Billy Jean' springs from your brain you're going to get sued, even if the MJ estate won't be able to prove how you did it.

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bsza 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That much I understand, but that question only comes up when the similarity is already an established fact, no? If we take the claim that this is a "complete rewrite" at face value, then there should be no reason for the code to have any uncanny similarities with chardet 6 beyond what is expectable from their functionality (which is not copyrightable) being the same, right?

So my (perhaps naive) understanding is if none can be found, then the author of chardet 1-6 simply doesn't have a case here, and we don't get to the point of asking "have you been exposed to the code?".

	▲	jacquesm 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, they're on the record as this being a derived work. There is no argument here at all. Not finding proof in a copyright case when the author is on the record about the infringement is a complete non-issue. You'd have to make that claim absent any proof and then there better not be any gross similarities between the two bodies of code that can not be explained away by coincidence. And then there is such a thing as discovery. I've been party to a case like this and won because of some silly little details (mostly: identical typos) and another that was just a couple of lines of identical JavaScript (with all of the variable names changed). Copyright cases against large entities are much harder to win because they have deeper pockets but against smaller parties that are clearly infringing it is much easier. When you're talking about documented protocols or interface specifications then it is a different thing, those have various exceptions and those vary from one jurisdiction to another. What can help bolster the case for the defense is for instance accurate record keeping, who contributed what parts, sworn depositions by those individuals that they have come up with these parts by their lonesome, a delivery pace matching that which you would expect from that particular employee without any suspicious outliers in terms of amount of code dropped per interval and so on. Code copied from online sources being properly annotated with a reference to the source also helps, because if you don't do that then it's going to look like you have no problem putting your own copyright on someone else's code. If it is real, then it is fairly easy to document that it is real. If it is not, after discovery has run its course it is usually fairly easy to prove that it is not if it is not.
	▲	swiftcoder 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> when the similarity is already an established fact The similarity is an established fact - the authors claim that this is chardet, to the extent that they are even using the chardet name! Had they written a similar tool with a different name, and placed it in its own repo, we might be having a very different discussion.

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pocksuppet an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is a balance of probabilities standard of proof. Both sides have the same burden of proof, it's equally split. Whoever has the stronger proof wins.