"Ketil Malde"
The point of the point is that neither of these are translations of literary works, there is no precedence for considering them as such, and that reading somebody's work (whether literary or source code) before writing one's own does not imply that the 'somebody' will hold any rights to the subsequent work.
So IANAL, but I do have an amateur interest in copyright law. The debate over the word "translation" is completely irrelevant. The important point is whether it is a "derived work". That phrase certainly includes more than mere translation. For example, it includes writing fiction that's set in the same fantasy universe or HHS the same characters as another author's works. It also includes making videos with someone else's music playing in the background. If you create a derived work, then the author of the original definitely has rights to it, regardless of whether it is a mere translation. That's also why the word "derived" in a comment was particularly Dacey to the legal staff and probably caused them to overreact in this case. The defense in the case of software is to say that the part that was copied was not a work of authorship in the sense that, say, a fiction character is. This is generally not a hard case to win, since courts see computer software as dominated by its practical function. But if you copied something that was clearly a matter of expression and not related to the function of the software, you could very well be creating a derived work over which the original author could assert control. That said, I agree that in this particular case it's very unlikely that the original author could have won an infringement case. I just balked a little at the statements about translation, which was really just an example.