Andrew Donnellan wrote:
I believe that under copyright law to be a separate copyrighted work requires that it be creative. Therefore, manually translating it can be considered creative (it's actually reimplementing the same algorithm (which cannot be copyrighted) in a different language), where as a machine translation is not creative and is therefore considered not copyrightable making it a derived work as it is based on an already copyrighter work.
That's not the case in Australian copyright law, since that argument was successfully used in Apple Computer (a Apple II clone maker copied the ROMs and Apple sued, Apple lost since the ROM binary was of not a literary work -- the assembler was the literary work). After that success the legislation was altered.