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From: barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,misc.legal
Subject: Re: What is the Copyright Issue?
Message-ID: <18862@think.UUCP>
Date: 5 Apr 88 17:21:18 GMT
References: <4611@june.cs.washington.edu>
Sender: usenet@think.UUCP
Reply-To: barmar@fafnir.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 52

In article <4611@june.cs.washington.edu> bnfb@uw-june.UUCP (Bjorn Freeman-Benson) writes:
>Consider music, books and chemicals:
>  * One can copyright a piece of music or a book.  One does not
>    copyright the process of typing it.
>  * One can patent molecules (such as anti-freeze).  One does not
>    patent the process or the machines to make it.

Yes, processes are patentable.  And machines are definitely patentable
(that's what patents were invented for).  In many cases, though, the
holder of the molecule patent is not the same as the holder of the
process/machine patent.  For example, someone could have a patent on a
centrifuge that is used as part of the process of making a patented
molecule, while someone else could have the patent on the molecule
itself.  And yet someone else could have the patent on using a
centrifuge to produce some particular class of molecules.

[Note -- I am not a chemist or chemical engineer, so I don't really
know whether centrifuges are used in creating new molecules -- it was
just the first lab machine that came into my head.]

In the software area, there is a patent on the process of using XOR to
display/erase a cursor on a bit-mapped display.  There's also a patent
on the Unix setuid mechanism (but I think AT&T decided not to enforce
their exclusive rights, so they aren't charging a royalty for it).

>The weak analogy in software is:
>  * One can NOT copyright the software.  One can only copyright the
>    source and executable.
>
>Does this make sense?  
>    No.  
>
>The copyright/patent applies the useful product, not to some intermediate
>stage.  What the courts have failed to realize is that the useful product
>in software is how it works, NOT the source code that produced it.

If you want to protect "how it works", you can use the patent
mechanism.  Copyright laws exist to prevent the expression of ideas,
not the ideas themselves.  Copyrighting software is not intended to
prevent someone else from implementing a similar program; this would
be like copyrighting the idea of a telephone.  Visual ("look and
feel") copyrights prevent that someone from copying your displays and
user-interface, but that doesn't prevent the program from having the
same function (unless the function is intimately tied to a particular
user-interface, e.g. a desk accessory editor whose purpose is to
provide a MacWrite-like interface).

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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