Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!harrier.ukc.ac.uk!mch
From: mch@ukc.ac.uk (Martin Howe)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Probelms With Protecting Intellectual Property
Keywords: copyright microcode apple (tm) trash can (tm) unix (tm)
Message-ID: <740@harrier.ukc.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Apr 89 13:51:36 GMT
References: <233@imspw6.UUCP>
Reply-To: mch@ukc.ac.uk (Martin Howe)
Followup-To: comp.misc
Organization: Lan/Micro Group, Comp. Lab, Univ. of Kent, CANTERBURY, UK
Lines: 39

In article <233@imspw6.UUCP> bob@imspw6.UUCP (Bob Burch) writes:
>
>From Ted Holden, HTE
>
[]
>out what I see as the central question involved here:  "How can we frame
>a law or system of laws which would simultaneously guarantee individual
>artists the rights to their own creations, companies the rights to their
>ligitimate developments, but prevent behemoths such as Apple Corp. from
>attempting to lay claim to air, earth, fire, water, and innumerable things
>which are basically computer software equivalents of ideas like controlling
>a four-wheeled vehicle via a wheel in front of the driver, and forcing us
>all to pay tribute for using any of the above?"

Part of the problem is deciding what is an original idea and what is not. There
is a story that Bell beat Edison to the Patent Office by 15 minutes with his
telephone design. Even if this is only apocryphal, it could easily have
happened. Edison might well have made a working version BEFORE Bell did
but lived further away from the patent office. I'm sure that there are other
second order effects that can mar the "first to the patent office" idea.
Right now, though, it's the only one we've got.

I thought up the idea of branch target cacheing as an undergrad in computer
systems three years ago, then read that AMD had already patented the idea.
The telephone was such a step forward enough and isolated enough that I don't
feel *too* bad about Edison. However NO ONE should have intellectual property
rights to something like branch target caching or trash cans as just about
EVERYONE was bound to think of it within a few years, or already had.

This sort of thing is normally decided by judges, but they are usually laymen
w.r.t. computer science and anyway, "the law is an ass" (no, I don't know
who said that :-). 

I'd like to think that Congress and Parliament could formulate a suitable
set of guidelines in their respective counrties, but I can't see it happening.

Any remarks... ?
-- 
Martin Howe                  (This posting is private, and NOT on behalf of UKC)