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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Patents are better for their purpose. | 354 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Ding ding ding!
Authored by: OpenSourceFTW on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 01:43 PM EST
We have a winner!

Why does software have to be double protected? Makes no sense at all.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • Ding ding ding! - Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 05:53 PM EST
What about copyright?
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 25 2012 @ 01:48 PM EST
The conference was about Patents. The number of logical thinkers
present, both lawyers and programmers, would rapidly steer the
discussion back on course if anyone tried to introduce an extraneous
topic. However I share your concern. If one side is adamant that
software does not need patents, and the other side absolutely requires
commercial-legal protection for software, then who is going to
postulate an alternative?

We have seen Copyright protect BusyBox. We saw Copyright wielded
unsuccessfully by SCO. Copyright protected Apple against Psystar.
A post above suggested that copyright would not work where the
source code was closed, a trade secret. It worked for Apple, the
defendant was found to have unlawfully copied the compiled
machine code. Unlawful in that they trangressed the Copyright
License attached to all sales of Apple's software.

I do see a small problem, where independent and different
source code is compiled to produce identical machine code.
The court could examine both Trade Secret source codes to
determine if copying occurred.


[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

What about copyright?
Authored by: feldegast on Monday, November 26 2012 @ 08:47 AM EST
lots of physical things have copyrights, from guitars, the arrangement of lights
on the Eiffel Tower (people have been
taken to court over photographing (copying) it) to surf
boards some of these could also be patented, a new fin
design, this could then also be copyrighted

software is unique not because it is both copyrighted and
patented but because due to its complexity it can have
hundreds or even thousands of patents or contain hundreds of
copyrights belonging to hundreds or thousands of people

so it is the quantity of exposure not the type that is the
issue

---
IANAL
My posts are ©2004-2012 and released under the Creative Commons License
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Patents are better for their purpose.
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 26 2012 @ 06:37 PM EST
Copyright is a single "performance" or only one method of reaching the
desired product. With patent you can generalize and eliminate all possible
methods of performing the same action. It's a land grab.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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