🚀 go-pugleaf

houpt@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Charles (Chuck) Houpt) asks:

>Is Turing under copyright or is it in the public domain?
>More generally: How do programming languages fit into the
>current intellectual property laws? Programming languages
>don't seem to fit into any of the standard categories, such
>as copyright or patent.
 
My understanding is that there is nothing about a programming 
language per se that can be copyrighted or patented, and thus
there is no protection for the language itself.  You can copyright
the language definition, for example the Turing language report,
but you cannot copyright the Turing language any more than you
can copyright English.  In this sense all programming languages
are in the public domain.

The *name* of the language can however be trademarked, and that
is the typical way of protecting from, say, unscrupulous language
implementors.  For example, you can build an Ada compiler if 
you like, and publish a language spec for it that is isomorphic
to Ada, but you cannot *call* it Ada unless you get the permission 
of the trademark holder.  The main reason for doing this is to
insure that implementations called by the language name actually 
implement the language as specified.  In the case of Ada, this is
tested using a validation suite of programs.

The name of the Turing language, like the name Ada, is trademarked.

Jim Cordy
Queen's University at Kingston
Cordy@QueensU.CA     cordy@qucis.bitnet     cordy%qucis.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu

(The opinions expressed above are my own and do not necessarily
reflect those of Holt Software Associates Inc., Queen's University or 
the University of Toronto.)