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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 02 2012 @ 11:51 AM EDT |
On point one, that's not correct. If instruction sets were directly
copyrightable (not excluded for being functional), you most certainly could
license them under terms that freely allowed use for the development of code to
execute under that CPU, but disallowed their use in developing other CPUs,
software emulations of the CPU, etc. The "free" (non-free) unrar
license had a very similar sort of license back in the day (permitted any use
for decompression, disallowed any use for compression). The precise extent of
the ability to enforce such a license may be untried, but the ability to offer
such licenses is precedented.
On the second point, that has been something many tech companies have in fact
very much wanted to do. That they haven't succeeded speaks somewhat to the basis
for belief that such things are not copyrightable. I seem to recall there have
been some legal battles in this area, but I don't recall any specifics.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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