🚀 go-pugleaf

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!

A person whom I respect as very knowledgeable about legal protection of
software made the following statement:

Anyone who invents a new computer language and writes a compiler for that
language, can prevent anyone else from writing a compiler for that language
or any directly derived language.  Strictly on the basis of a copyright.

Here is the trick.  The compiler contains within it a list of keywords.  The
keywords are the single most important piece of the copyrighted compiler.
Any compiler which compiles the same language must contain the same list
of keywords.  Clearly this would be an intentional copyright violation.

There are many ways to express the same ideas that the reserved word list
expresses for a new language.  For instance the author of a clone compiler
might use BEGIN and END instead of { }.  The use of identical keywords can
only be the result of an intentional effort to copy the keyword list in
the original compiler.

There is no written law which says that a person is allowed to write a
cross-compiler for Lotus Macros.  There is no written law which says that a
programmer can take the keywords in the C language and add a couple, and
distribute the new compiler as a separate work.  It is derived.  While
patents allow an inventor to improve upon an invention and cross-license the
improvement back to the original inventor, copyrights give no such right.

Without an explicit law saying that the above is not true, or instead
several court cases saying the above is not true, I have to believe that
copyrights do presently give the author ownership to even something as
simple as a language.  Given present laws, I see no reason to be optimistic
about my freedom to write software which is plug-compatible with existing
software.

But there is more.  Apple seems to be claiming that they invented overlapping
windows.  Not just one pair of them, but ANY and ALL overlapping windows.
Ones I create, that they have never seen.

The copyright office refuses to accept screen dumps as delineations of what
is copyrighted in software look-and-feel.  Instead they accept the first and
last several pages of the source code as complete specification of the
expressions embodied in the code.  No matter that the pages be blank, or
contain comments.  When the copyright is up, the public gets nothing.

It seems probable to me that inventions expressed as programs, and covered
by software copyright, will NEVER come into the public domain.

This situation is a disaster.  This is absolutely not in the best interest
of customers.  And it is not in the best interest of programmers.  I think
that the present situation is not in the best interest of society.

						Lawrence