21 Aug
2015
21 Aug
'15
3:28 p.m.
It also brings up another issue. When they did finally get some legal
stuff into place (circa 1988 over here) was it retrospective.?
If not then by definition anything prior is not protected and my be
freely distributed.
Rod
On 21/08/2015 22:34, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, Rod Smallwood wrote:
And...
We have a new question. What would have been the first piece of
copyrightable software?
Combined with the issue that many lawyers and judges did not consider
software to BE copyrightable.
And then, there was a general consensus that the code was
copyrightable, but not the performance. You could legally create your
own Puckman program, so long as you didn't use any of their code.
That led to projects such as Adam Osborne's Paperback Software, which
did clean-room writing of duplicates of popular software. Until Lotus
stomped him.
That led to Look&Stink protection, sometimes extending to the sequence
and names of the choices in a normal "Files" menu.
At the time, if Adam were to have been a few months earlier in
acquiring any of the rubble of VisiCorp, it could have been all over!
Delrina was not upheld on their "parody" defense of Opus & Bill
shooting flying toasters, in which the "victim" was an infringer of an
album cover.
Consider Xerox in the Windoze/Mac copyright battle!
Many have always considered fundamental concepts to not be copyrightable.
Where would MICROS~1 be if Gary Kildall were to have been litigious?
(Novell's acquisition of DRI was solely for the IP rights, as a "Get
Out Of Jail Free" card against any Microsoft attack)