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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Lots of trolling going on | 451 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Lots of trolling going on
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 12:15 AM EDT
No, the law allows copyright to be overridden for certain matters such as the
best interests of society (I paraphrase).

This is where fair use comes from.

Since culture and progress relies on the continual reinterpretation of existing
ideas it would be a disaster for a society to not permit a certain amount of
"reuse".

The Beatles' "Twist and Shout" is copyrightable.

But the C chord isnt and neither is the chord sequence C F G. Or the phrase
"Twist and Shout".

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Yes, to a point
Authored by: pem on Friday, May 04 2012 @ 10:06 AM EDT
Not every creative expression can be copyrighted, else whoever first came up
with "Duuuuude" would be owed a lot of money.

And even Judge Alsup pointed out that technical documentation is held to a
different standard than creative fiction, for the simple fact that two people
describing the same functional item using the same standard technical jargon are
going to necessarily come up with very similar descriptions.

A lot of creativity goes into circuit design. The schematics can be
copyrighted, but the underlying circuit cannot. If it is a novel invention it
can be patented.

But you cannot copyright the layout and functionality of the pins on the
connector that go to the circuit. You can copyright a description of the pins
on the connector (documentation), but copyright on that is much weaker than in a
novel. A program API is very similar to a connector on an electrical device,
allowing you to access the underlying functionality of the device.

This gets back to "sweat of the brow" which covers, in some cases,
what most of us might call creativity. The fact that it was hard to do doesn't
necessarily make it patentable or copyrightable.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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