🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.980928140832.24247A-100000@howard>,
Patrick  <patrick@howard.genetics.utah.edu> wrote:
> If I write a book, it is copywrited and is my intellectual property.  The 
> book is analagous to software...it is not a concrete thing, just the 
> media that holds the idea (the story) is concrete.  Should you be able to 
> acquire this book for free?  How about using the idea of my story 
> (software) in a story of your own?  That is plaigerism and theft, yet 
> what are you stealing?  An idea.  Should authors go unpaid for their 
> work?  All they are doing is releasing ideas in written form.  No one can 
> then take that idea and use it without the original author's express 
> permission (and after paying for the right, quite often).

It really depends on how close to the original the second work is.  If
you write a story whose basic outline is "Boy meets girl, B loses G, B
finds G again" and someone else then writes another story with the
same basic outline but with no other points of similarity, then no
court on the planet would uphold any complaint by you against them.
Even if they were both set in Wichita.

Exactly what constitutes plagarism is an often fiercely contested
thing.  Outright copying is naturally Right Out without (effectively)
a license from you but if the details of the plot are different and
the names are no more similar than might be statistically expected
(you could both have John Doe as a leading character :^) then I
seriously doubt that many people would take your complaint as anything
other than a nuisance action.  Courts tend not to be too fond of those
(at least in the UK.)

The question remains whether software (which often has a fairly short
useful lifespan) should have the same IP rights and restrictions
associcated with it as a fiction book or a play (which typically has a
much longer useful lifespan - people are still reading King Lear and
the Odyssey.)  How many copies of Windows98 do you think will still be
in use and supported in 2008, and that is a major software product?

Donal.
-- 
Donal K. Fellows    http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/    fellowsd@cs.man.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, U.K. +44-161-275-6137
--
If you staple a penguin to the head of a gnu, the result won't catch herring...