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From: darryl@ism780c.UUCP (Darryl Richman)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Windows/Mac Copyrights
Message-ID: <9590@ism780c.UUCP>
Date: 31 Mar 88 21:08:26 GMT
References: <5480@well.UUCP> <4092@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <1719@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <1454@csib.csi.UUCP> <7987@sol.ARPA> <4795@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU> <1457@csib.csi.UUCP> <337@dbase.UUCP>
Reply-To: darryl@ism780c.UUCP (Darryl Richman)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 41

In article <337@dbase.UUCP> tessler@dbase.UUCP (Steven Tessler) writes:
>You can copyright the expression of an idea but not an idea.

Right.

>For example,  if program 'A' is a check book balancing program
>and program 'B' is also a check book balancing program and both
>programs "look and feel" similar but the source code is substantially
>different then both programs are different expressions of a like idea.
>Neither program 'A' or program 'B' is a copy of one another so how
>could a copyright of program 'A' be infringed by program 'B'?

This is a confusion of two different copyright issues.  If A and B look
and feel the same, regardless of their internals, one may be in conflict
with the other's copyright.  This is because it may be copying an audio-
visual work.

The source code for a program may be copyrighted as a literary work.  In
this case, it would appear from the direction that the courts are going
(as interpretted by myself!), that the basic structure and algorithms
used are the turning point for determining if the expression has been
copied.  An analogy might be a book, where the story line is the same,
the characterizations are very similar, but the place and people names
and unimportant, background details have been changed.

Most commercial applications are now copyrighted as both a literary
work to protect the code and as an audiovisual work, to protect the
"user interface".

The reason for this approach is that, for example, I could steal your
code for a dental office manager, and by changing all of the visuals,
call it a legal office manager.  Depending how your application was built,
their might not be ANY on screen resemblance (although the order and
format of data entry would be the same), but the code would be very similar.


		--Darryl Richman
-- 
Copyright (c) 1988 Darryl Richman. The views expressed are the author's alone.
	  INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation -- An Eastman Kodak Company
       ...!{cca!ima | sdcrdcf}!ism780c!darryl or darryl@ism780c.isc.com
"I'm disappointed too, but keep in mind that Transmogrification is a new technology." --Calvin