[CLUE-Talk] Patent Infringement

[Timothy C. Klein]

* Dennis J Perkins (djperkins at americanisp.net) wrote:
> 
> > * Jeffery Cann (fabian at jefferycann.com) wrote:
> > > On Monday 03 March 2003 12:44 am, bill ehlert wrote:
> > > >     so why are we making fun of it???
> 
> I have a friend who argues that programs should be denied copyright
> unless the source code can be viewed. His argument is that unless
> you can read the source code, a program should be viewed as a trade
> secret.
>

I would tend to agree with this, in principle. In practice, it would
cause serious financial harm to a large part of our economy (not to
mention a lot of coders), if binary machine code was not given copyright
protection. But the idea behind copyright was that your *ideas* were
released into the public, and belong to all. You are only granted the
right to *copy*. Hence the name.

With binary, closed-source software, there is no knowledge given to the
public.  We are therefore granting a monopoly on copying, as a society,
but we are not getting back that which we are supposed to be getting,
ie, the knowledge contained in the source code.  Software copyright,
while not all together bad, is, in its current form, causing too much
harm for the benefit that society is getting.

But, the original thread was about *patents*, which are a wholly
different beast.

Tim
--
==============================================
==  Timothy Klein || teece at silverklein.net  ==
==  http://i148.denver.dsl.forethought.net  ==
== ---------------------------------------- ==
== "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings... ==
==============================================