Microsoft's C# (Sharp) & .NET -- A Heads Up

[Martijn Faassen]

Thaddeus L. Olczyk <olczyk at interaccess.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jul 2000 05:22:56 GMT, "Stephen Hansen"
> <stephen at cerebralmaelstrom.com> wrote:

>>You can't copyright a
>>'concept' or an 'idea'. You can copyright your perticular application of
>>said idea or concept.

> Class A moron.

That was completely unwarranted.

> Read some verdicts and get a clue.

That is too. If you feel the urge to flame, reconsider and talk about how
acquisition and inheritance can both be modelled by containment, or talk
about what came first, RNA-life or protein life (or something else). And
don't flame. :)

> Yes you can.

You cannot copyright ideas. You can only copyright expressions of
ideas. You can *patent* certain ideas, though. Traditionally this too
was only limited to particular implementions, but recently 
this has been eroded severely; we've seen the patenting of various
algorithms and even simpler computer related stuff, and even business
methods such as 'the downloading of music' or 'one-click shopping'.

Copyright has however nothing to do with this. Let's take for instance
take this, from US copyright act selections, at:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/property/library/copyrightact.html

(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship
extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation,
concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is
described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

This seems pretty clear. The Berne convention on copyright itself doesn't
seem to specify this explicitly. It says this:

  The expression "literary and artistic works" shall include every production
  in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the
  mode or form of its expression, such as [snip big list]

I.e. people have certain rights to determine what happens with their 
production, whatever form of expression it may be. It only covers productions,
though, not what caused the production to happen.

Ideas-are-free-and-let's-keep-it-that-way-ly yours,

Martijn
-- 
History of the 20th Century: WW1, WW2, WW3?
No, WWW -- Could we be going in the right direction?