🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <10063@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, butcher@g.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Lawrence
Butcher) writes:
|> Look-and-Feel Copyrights, and Copyrights on anything besides Source Code:
|> 
|> Utter disaster.  Catastrophe.  There is no physical embodiment of the
|> protected work!  There are no claims!
|> 
|> The only way that it can be decided whether one creative effort infringes on
|> another is by going to court!  The only way to show that an idea has been
|> expressed before is in court!

  I think the solution to this is to make a user interface copyright, to
specify the features, and to make the copyright super easy to get, so
any dinky programmer can copyright a user interface. Also award the
copyright to the earliest application, rather than spend millions on
trying to establish who had the idea first.

  Then make the term two years after application and/or three years
after first publication in software. That would let people who come up
with a novel idea have a few years to write the software, and a few
years to gain some reward from being inventive, and still get the
interface into public domain quickly. It would penalize people who just
copyright an idea without using it, since the idea must be in a program
within two years, and keep companies from hiding an interface until they
are ready to copyright it, since someone else can beat them.

  This eliminates a lot of litigation, rewards the clever, makes stuff
available to the rest of the world quickly, and would undoubtedly be
opposed by the lawyers and software companies, since it makes sense.
--
Bill Davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com, uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
  GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
  Moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc and 386users mailing list
"Stupidity, like virtue, is it's own reward" -me