First Internet message

[Fred Cisin]

Another only partially related issue was copyright moving from the code 
itself to the "look and feel" of the finished product.

Am I correct that it used to be possible to write a Puck-boy game that was 
hard to tell from it, IF the code was original.  Hence lots of 
"clean-room/double-blind reverse engineering", to produce identically 
functioning products without using, or even seeing, the source code.

I doubt that it was the ONLY case, but that was the issue for Adam 
Osborne's Paperback Software, which made a Lotus clone.

Since then, it has to look different also.
Lotus did not like that the menu choices in Paperback's products were the 
same ones.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com


On Thu, 2 Jan 2020, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 4:44 AM W2HX via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> wrote:
>
>> software is currently non-patentable. Not sure the order of when it
>> was/wasnt but currently is not.
>>
>
> I don't know anything about patents in other countries, but in the USA,
> software is _definitely_ patentable, and has been since the 1970s. It was
> ruled in 1853 that an abstract idea apart from its implementation is not
> patentable (O'Reilly v. Morse). However, it has later been considered that
> software is (or at least can be) more than just an abstract idea (Diamond
> v. Diehr 1981).
>
> What changed recently is that SCOTUS ruled in Alice Corp. V. CLS Bank
> International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014) that taking some existing process or
> business practice and doing exactly the same thing with a computer or
> software involved is NOT a new patentable invention.