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0 pointskoolba3y ago0 comments

It’s also likely in violation of arcane copyright law. The oracle wire protocol includes a handshake procedure that sends a poem in one of the initial messages. It’s untested legal theory whether copying that poem in a new work (e.g. a new driver or compatability layer) would violate Oracle’s copyright on the poem.

https://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html

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easton3y ago

Weird, Apple does a similar thing with macOS startup on Intel (and more recently, Rosetta on Linux). If the magic haiku isn’t given the OS won’t start.

http://www.rcfp.org/sites/default/files/docs/20120105_202426... is when Apple tried to get the haiku protected as a trade secret

Bonus fun fact: Once the “don’t steal Mac OS” kext is loaded, a longer poem is loaded into memory (at least, it was around Tiger):

Your karma check for today:

There once was was a user that whined

his existing OS was so blind,

he’d do better to pirate an OS that ran great

but found his hardware declined.

Please don’t steal Mac OS! Really, that’s way uncool.

(https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-warns-off-os-pirates-wit...)

counttheforks3y ago

The thing that's "uncool" is that apple bundles their software and hardware together and won't let you buy just one of the two.

quonn3y ago

Very interesting. But I think there are pretty clear rules that permit compatible implementation of wire protocols.

rtpg3y ago

Actually I’m pretty sure a lawsuit with Nintendo’s game boy drm (where you needed to have the logo in memory to boot) went to court and it was ruled that if working with the system required copying the copyrighted text then it’s fair use (US, long time ago and in a different but similar concept)

supportlocal4h3y ago

Is an encryption key copyrightable? Or a password?

Is it illegal to recite a copywrited work? Is it illegal to recite a translation of a copywrited work?

Can you copyright a number? For instance, a long binary number? If a piece of code contains a long binary number that it transmits to another device as a raw number, does it matter if the other device can arbitrarily interpret that number as a copyrighted work using SJIS or ASCII or some tortured encoding created just to turn a specific number into a specific copyrighted work? If the number was stored in UTF8 so that each 1 was encoded as 00000001 then decoded to a 1 for transmission, can you really claim any copywrite violation?

And why does my brain waste time thinking up such questions?

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