So I suppose being able to memorise and then replicate it? That's not bad. I was thinking along the lines of knowing about a joke where Taylor Swift lyrics were attributed to Mark Twain (for example) would violate Tay tay's moral right of attribution, and that could happen by simply knowing the joke.
Another example could be clean room design. Essentially reverse engineering code without using copyrighted code. Having someone on a team who has reviewed leaked code could compromise a project and make it more likely to be hit with a copyright claim if they slip up.
This has been an issue/topic of debate with multiple open source projects such as ReactOS.
I could be slightly off here but this is my understanding of it. I hope someone corrects me if I'm off base.
Yeah this was something else I was thinking of. I'm not exactly sure about the mechanics of the infringement here, but it seems like simply knowing a thing taints you for producing a work. I guess it's more about ease of proving?
The key here is that it taints you, not the thing. Just because the source code of eg.: Acrobat is known because the source is leaked, that does not make the source code of an alternative instantly illegal.
This reminds me of a question I heard long ago: if you take a copyrighted material A and XOR it with another material B, and then you distribute the result C, who can claim infringement if at all? The company which owns A or the one which owns B?
Especially that in order to actually claim infringement it means company A obtained a copy of the material of B in order to verify C infringes their rights.
Interesting. Very similar to the copyright logjam which Jim Sterling tries to create in Youtube. Basically uses copyrights of several companies and when they all claim ownership, then none of them can monetise the video.
But you don't make it public you did that. If summoned to court, you XOR C with innocuous file D, to get result E, which looks like a random encryption key. Then you tell them the file is D XOR E.
It helps if either A or B is random. There's no chance that your randomly encrypted file is accidentally the XOR of two non-random files.