[Patents] Re: regulation draft proposal: revision

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

>No because with copyright, you are in the clear if you wrote the
>program yourself without copying anything.

Not necessarily.  If you end up writing the same program as me,
independent creation is not a complete defense.  If you write something
slightly different, probably still not a defense.

Only when you write your program in a clean room environment, just
looking at someone else's functionality (like an executable) to
create similar functionality code (like people who developed DOS BIOS
clones in the 1980s) do you escape copyright infringement.  But if
the source code is already published, it get harder to prove truly
independent creation.

Greg Aharonian