| I believe that the answer is no, nothing else is currently protected by both
copyright and patents, and that is the way that governments worldwide have
intended it to be until quite recently, for very good reasons. You may well
ask, why is software so special that it merits dual protection? It doesn't, of
course, and it is unfair and illogical from any rational point of view for it to
be so. I always think of the means by which something is created, to see how
it should be protected. To create a machine tool, you buy lots of fancy tools
and equipment, and spend a lot of money building and evaluating the prototype,
then even more money building a production line for it. Patentable. To create
some new medicine, which will cure something trivial like wrinkles, you spend a
vast amount of money on research, even more on testing, and more again to get it
past the FDA. Patentable. To produce a book, as a minimum you have an idea, go
out and get a cheap PC and some free software. You then type away for many, many
hours, and spend lots of time and effort trying to find a publisher, or put some
money up front into a print on demand service. Some investment, and protected by
copyright, automatically in most countries, but it helps to state it clearly and
maybe register it. The "source code" is on public view and inspires others to
write their own books, always borrowing ideas from what they have read. To
write software, as a minimum you have an idea, go out and get a cheap PC and
some free software. You then type away for many, many hours, and spend hardly
any time and negligible money uploading it to Sourceforge or similar, or get
someone to duplicate CDs, a bit like the print on demand, cost-wise. The
fundamental investment, idea and lots of time and effort, is exactly the same as
writing a book. The result therefore should be protected by copyright, and is,
again automatically in most places. The source code may be hidden, or put on
public view, in which case it will inspire others to write their own programs,
always borrowing ideas from what they have read. So why, why, why did someone
ever inmagine that software was ever entitled to any more protection than a
book? Or if not, why are books not patented? Now that one would have the authors
really screaming, rightly, because they would not be able to use any plot or
minor sub plot that had appeared in someone else's book in the last 20 years. It
would kill the entire book "industry", both fiction and non-fiction. Oh wait,
the same thing is killing the software industry.... [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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