[Patents] more inflammatory speeches from Greg

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> Hartmut writes:
> >Copyright is the authors right to his individual creation.
>
> Sorry, but that is partly false.  The author has no rights to the
> ideas, processes and methods disclosed in his creation, which is
> explicitly prohibited by national and global copyright laws.

Exactly:  the ideas, processes and methods are not part of the individual
creation.  They are not individual but common aspects of all creations.

> You should stop posting such nonsense until you have the provisions
> and decisions of copyright laws.  Copyright is not an absolute
> right.  Furthermore the author gets no protection for aspects of
> his work called scenes-a-faire (i.e. aspects of his works already
> publicly disclosed, the equivalent of the patent world's prior art).
> For source code, copyright offers next to no protection because of
> these aspects of copyright.

This may be true for some small program pieces.  Any complex program will
however bear the mark of individual skill, imagination etc, so there is
enough for copyright to protect.

Even for small uncreative program chunks, there is still some protection
available due to informal mechanisms like source-code secret etc.  The
combination of copyright with these mechanisms again makes for a very
strong property building mechanism, as we all know from practise.

It may be intellectually unsatisfying for some people that copyright
treats a groundbreaking program idea such as RSA as 'uncreative' (not an
individual creation) while it will reward the creation of a complex
system, in which perhaps 90% of the work is the outflow of normal human
toil and skill rather than any very special achievement such as 'finding
the stone of the wise' (as we say in German).  But there is nothing wrong
with that, at least if the stone will be found anyway.  Which it will, as
long as invisible hands (such as copyright-earnings, academic fame,
"opensource as on the job training", magic cauldrons and many more) keep
many of us busy writing cool programs.  Adam Smith's invisible hand is for
maximising overall productivity, not infinite justice according to some
standard of "science and logic" or patent movement beliefs.

The theory of copyright as a protection of individual creation has been
particularly nicely worked with respect to computer programs in the

        BGH Decision 'Betriebssystem' (operating system) 1990
        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/bgh1-bs90/

available in German only so far.  This same decision also explains that
operating systems are not technical and therefore not patentable, because
they are nothing but a programming solution within a given logical
context.


-- 
Hartmut Pilch                                         http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation      http://swpat.ffii.org/
95000 signatures against software patents       http://www.noepatents.org/