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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 27 2012 @ 09:03 PM EDT |
Speaking as one who has written computer code for fun and profit, I disagree.
Code (in source, compiled executable or processed form) is both functional and
expressive at the same time. I'd argue it is closer to a sculpture or an
architectural design than a literary book. Except that it doesn't need to be
physically manifested to be fully expressed. It only needs to be transformed
into a form suitable for the perception, usage and (potentially) enjoyment the
receiver/user of the code.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 28 2012 @ 08:37 AM EDT |
The purpose of IP law is to promote the progress of the arts and useful
sciences(or something like that), while trying to ensure that the
creator/inventor is fairly rewarded for sharing their work with the public
You can write a spread sheet program.
Anyone can write a spreadsheet program.
Everyone agrees it's a good program
How do you protect it?
Patent? Seems too strong, you lock away the idea of a spreadsheet for as long as
the "inventor" can keep patenting new ideas on top of his
spreadsheet.
It would be foolish to suggest that a patent should apply to such a thing.
And anyway what *exactly* is this thing that you call a "spreadsheet".
Wait now, stop telling me what it does/can do , point at it show me the tangible
expression that is "spreadsheet"
It's a bunch of software.
What's that?
It's these manuals, specifications and other documents
It's this source code
And this Object code
What's the Object code? that looks like just numbers.
It is, it's a computer readable representation of the source code.
Okay, so you've got an idea, a description of the idea, an
expression/implementation of the idea written down in this thing you call source
code which you use to make this thing you call a "program" which is
this thing called Object Code.
So "spreadsheet" is basically the "plot line" of your source
code?
So if you get copyright in your manual, no one can write a manual that looks
like yours.
If you have copyright in your source code, then it is protected, but others can
continue to write source code that may do similar things in other ways,.
If we also give you copyright in your Object code, that means that people just
can't help themselves to your program once you've published it.
Which means you are protected from unauthorised copying of your program and can
be justly recompensed in the event where someone chooses to abuse your rights.
And thus is created a thriving software market where developers and software
houses compete on features, functionality, design, ease of use, speed, both in
terms of the speed of your program and the speed at which you bring updates and
new products to market, reliability , security and any number of other benefits
that you would expect as a result of promoting the useful arts.
But wait, I hear you say, Software code is functional.
Yes it is, and it is expressive, fortunately we already have a body of copyright
law that covers all of that.
It's called abstraction/filtration.
There are certain bits of your software source code that are not protected, one
very fine distinction here is that in software names are required for
interoperability, so they are the same as facts, akin to the names and numbers
in a telephone book, and the "words" in a dictionary.
It was 1976, IP/Copyright law had caught up with modern technobabble, and the
world was in a good place, software proliferated, ideas were exchanged, sets of
names were agreed upon and came to be called standards,
If you wrote source code to the standard as defined in the specification of the
aforementioned standard, your software would work wherever that standard was
supported.
Best practices were discovered and shared such that a whole world full of
programmers built great libraries of the best code and ported those libraries
to every platform that could possibly run them.
Thousands and thousands of books were written about the subject and ideas
Dozens and dozens of different platforms became available.
Operating systems were proliferating, faster than people could learn how to use
them.
Application choices were exploding exponentially,
Even new programming languages were cropping up at a rate faster than any
programmer could keep up with them because programming was hard, new languages
helped to make it easier.
And then suddenly it all stopped dead, worse it declined massively.
Compare:
Number of spreadsheet applications for..
Number of operating system choices for..
Commodore 64?
A New PC?
Consider:
Number of platform choices before/after?
Number of application choices before/after?
Benson?
Flook?
Diehr?
Lowry?
StateStreet?
And today we found ourselves in the situation where a certain company argued
that a <3% share of the market in consumer space should be considered clear
evidence of a thriving competitive market and just because they controlled 97%
was not itself evidence that they had a market monopoly let alone that they
might be abusing it.
Did that have anything to do with platform availability?
And now if you write a spreadsheet program, unless you open source it and give
it away for free you're going to get a big unstoppable infringement suit
steam-roller squishing you before you can say "this makes no sense",
and don't be so certain you're safe just because you make no money from it.
Was that patent or copyright which did that?
Copyright worked for years, it would still work today.
And if people stopped being dazzled by the patter and shuffling hands and
mis-direction, they would see through this copyright mess that has been created
and understand that you just have to apply long established standards to the
problem, and the bubble of thin copyright protection asserted in the SSO would
burst like a Xi b^* before it hit the detector.
IM(NS)HO[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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