From ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es  Wed Dec 20 18:36:43 2000
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 19:36:43 +0100
From: Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es
Subject: [Patents] regulation draft proposal: revision

On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 07:24:49PM +0100, Bernard Lang wrote:
> 
> > Increasingly industries and technologies are all about "ideas", ideas
> > worth protecting.  I argue for their patentability both because most
> > ideas have functionality and utility, and also because if you force
> > people to rely on copyrights (which is increasingly being weakened)
>                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> sure ... just repeat it ... and it'll become true

Both of you are right. Some clarification is necessary.

Some lawyers think that copyright is being "weakened" because of
lawsuits like Lotus vs. Borland or Computer Associates vs. Altai. As I
will explain bellow, I think that what they call "weaken" is actually
the right thing.

The first of the cases is about copyright of user interfaces. Learning
to use a new program is a very time consuming task. It costs lots of money
to companies: courses, retraining and so on. So many users prefer to stick
to the program that they know to use. Borland Quattro Pro included the option
of using the same menu structure of Lotus 123, for those users who were
used to Lotus 123. It is quite clear that this kind of copy of the user
interface should be allowed. Borland did not offer that option to save
the work of inventing their own menu strucutre because they included their
own menu structure as well. And, in my opinion, for that reason Borland
won the lawsuit in the US Supreme Court. This Court ruled that user interfaces
are excluded from copyright protection.

Many lawyers see this as a "weakness" of copyright protection, as if the
copyright protection, like a cow for her owner, the stronger and healthier
the better. I think that copyright protection should serve the society, rather
than the reverse. In cases like user interfaces, where copyright protection
does not appear to benefit the society, it should not exist.

In the other case, Computer Associates employed a programmer from Altai.
This programmer left with some source code listings about a protocol for
communicating with mainframes. He used that code without the knowledge
of Computer Associates. When this company learned this, they removed all
that code and ordered to write all of it from scratch in a clean-room
situation. Leaving apart that network protocols should not be protected
for clear monopolistic reasons, apparently Computer Associates acted
in good faith. And they won the lawsuit.

Ramon




