[Patents] the burden factor in soft vs hard

[Gregory Aharonian srctran@world.std.com]

Luuk writes:
>I still do not understand why plain copyright would not be sufficient
>protection for these exchanged designs in the middle stages, though.

Your question is one that is asked about software as well, and indeed
has been suggested many times in this forum.

At least here in the US, copyright over the years has been viewed as a
weakening form of protection, especially after a few very visible cases
(Apple vs. Microsoft, Lotus vs. Borland) in which copyright protection
for software features was denied.  While some of the explosion in
software patenting was due to more libel court rulings in the 1990s,
some of it was also due to people's perceptions that copyright protection
was being weakened.

Additionally, copyright allows independent creation (which led to the
development of companies, for example, that cloned the DOS BIOS system
by setting up clean rooms with people who had never seen the actual
source code to the original BIOS being cloned).

Also, if you read some of the software copyright court rulings, the
tests of infringement they make use of look like little more than the
same tests used on the patent side.  So if you are going to end up
trying to defend your intellectual property, and it costs you about
the same to protect your property using either patent or copyrights,
you might as well use patent protection because your enforcement
powers are much greater (the cost of acquiring the patent not being
that much of a burden for the established companies doing all of this).

Greg Aharonian