That's exactly the right question!
As long as the input was done by a human, the machine only does a technical translation of goods (but not a creation of goods), so the output is just as eligible wrt. copyright as the input. But here comes the problem and why I mentioned particularly German law: If the input was not eligible wrt. copyright (e. g. because it was just a few mathematical symbols bot nothing "extraordinary" which is "worth" getting protected by German law) then the output also is not eligible wrt. copyright!
To sum up: To be on the safe side in all countries, the generated output must produce either exactly the same license header than the input had (not any kind of standard), or the tool must have a configurable option which headers are to be generated so the caller can choose. Otherwise there might always be some countries where the generated output is just legally wrong.
-Markus
From: Bill Shannon [mailto:bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Samstag, 15. Dezember 2018 01:31
To: EE4J PMC Discussions; Markus KARG
Subject: Re: [ee4j-pmc] License guidance for auto-generated files
I'm curious as to what German law says about the copyright/license of the output of a program for which the output depends on (is derived from) input with a particular copyright/license.
It would seem weird/bad if simply running a copyrighted/licensed document through a program produced output that was not copyrighted/licensed. Wouldn't that be a simple way to subvert the intent of the copyright/license? There must be more to it than that.
Markus KARG wrote on 12/14/18 10:22 AM:
Ivar,
most people from the US think they can export their legal system to Europe. This simply does not work, as US copyright laws and German copyright law is totally different (e. g. in Germany you cannot see or buy IP but you only can sell or buy licences to use IP). So as the EF really cares about IP, they should ask the EF Europe / EF Germany for their lawyer's opionions, instead of posting individual non-official opinions.
As I told you in JavaLand, in Germany rules are different than in the US. A copyright can only be granted to humans, and to do that, the human has to create a more or less exceptional work by his own hands / brains (in particular, things that the average engineer could invent could not be copyrighted). So whatevery a machine creates can definitively not be copyrighted! If a machine applies a copyright into a machine-generated work, this would be worthless (at best, it would be confusing; at worst, it could be interpreted as an attempt of fraud).
-Markus
Thanks Markus!
Do you by that say that it must NOT be "1"? Or would that be ok as well?
Auto-generated files (at least in Germany) do not fulfil any criteria needed to be copyrighted at all, as machines cannot hold copyright. Hence (at least in Germany) it must be "2".
-Markus
I would say "1" sounds like the reasonable answer, but there may be some rules that I am not aware of...
Hi,
The Jakarta EL Reference Implementation has a JavaCC grammar for EL that
is licensed under the standard license:
EPL-2.0 OR GPL-2.0 WITH Classpath-exception-2.0
This grammar is then used as an input to JavaCC which generates a Java
parser for EL that consists of a handful of Java files.
A question has arisen as to what license header should be applied to the
generated files.
Is it:
1. The standard license?
2. No license (because they are auto-generated)?
3. Something else?
I'm expecting the answer to either be "1" or "1 or 2 but we recommend 1".
Currently, "1" is being used.
Thanks,
Mark
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