[CLUE-Talk] Legal breaking of the MS monopoly

[Matthew Porter]

"Timothy C. Klein" <teece at silverklein.net> wrote:

> * Matthew Porter (mfporter at c-creature.com) wrote:
> > This isn't quite accurate as a description of copyright law.  You
> >might beconfusing copyright law with an aspect of patent law.  The
> >ideas in a copyrighted work are not placed in the public domain "in
> >exchange for" the privilege of copyright protection.  Rather, copyright
> >protection simply doesn't extend to ideas, so ideas are *always* in the
> >public domain as far as copyright is concerned.   Copyright only covers
> >specific expression.  
>
> You are right, IANAL, and I don't know a heck of a lot about copyright
> law.  But from what I have read of the the Nation's founders had, what I
> described was the *intent* of those that originally thought this stuff
> up.  If it is different today, then our laws have betrayed the spirit of
> what was intended.  Ideas were not allowed to be copyrighted on purpose,
> not by accident.  Copyright is almost self-defining, it grants the
> "Right> to Copy" and nothing more. The fact that that is not so simple
> today> represents a failure on our part.
>  
>  
[clip]

> >Patent law, on the other hand, is designed with the kind of
> >quid-pro-quo you describe.  In exchange for filing public documents
> >which describe your invention in enough detail so that someone else
> >could use it, you get a time-limited monopoly on the use of that
> >invention.
>
> I realize that patent law works this way.  I believe the first drafters
> of copyright law intended something similar for copyright.
>  
>

I certainly agree that copyright was supposed to grant a limited right, for
a limited time, and today's laws have gone way beyond the original intent.
 My point was more that ideas aren't *placed* in the public domain in
exchange for copyright protection -- ideas are *in* the public domain,
copyright or no copyright, whether a work's creator likes it or not.

But the original intent of copyright law was to promote creation of new
works -- unlike patent law, which was intended to encourage not only
invention, but also *disclosure* of inventions.  

Copyright law does intentionally refuse to protect certain things, such as
ideas, but it doesn't (and as far as I know, was never intended to)
require disclosure of anything.  You can write a novel, put it in a
drawer, never show it to anyone, and still it's protected by copyright.

But until computers came along the disclosure part of the copyright
equation was self-enforcing, so the law never had to deal with it.  You
won't make any money on that novel *unless* you disclose it to the public.

So to some extent this shows how today's application of copyright law to
computer source code is a mismatch.  Here we have the sitution --
unthinkable in the 18th century -- where something can be protected by
copyright, and a source of financial gain, and never disclosed to the
public.  Maybe we need an entirely new category of IP, with the some of
the limitations of copyright and some of the disclosure requirements of
patent.

 --Matt.

----------
Matthew Porter
Golden, Colorado

mfporte at c-creature.com