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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!news.uoregon.edu!arclight.uoregon.edu!news.dacom.co.kr!usenet.seri.re.kr!news.cais.net!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!nwnews.wa.com!news1.halcyon.com!coho!tzs From: tzs@coho.halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Historic Opportunity facing Free Unix (was Re: The Lai/Baker paper, benchmarks, and the world of free UNIX) Date: 9 May 1996 05:38:00 GMT Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services Lines: 28 Message-ID: <4ms0bo$h21@news1.halcyon.com> References: <NELSON.96Apr15010553@ns.crynwr.com> <4mmhcj$dfr@news1.halcyon.com> <31901BFD.7BAC@vfr.interceptor.com> <4mqo4d$kbq@t3.mscf.uky.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: coho.halcyon.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.development.system:23428 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:941 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:3713 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:3544 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:19025 comp.os.linux.advocacy:48673 David W. Rankin Jr. <rankin@ewl.uky.edu> wrote: >The idea of the copyright system isn't to protect the ideas, but the >time it took you to make the ideas into a product. Actually, what the idea of the copyright system is depends on if you prefer Locke to Hagel, but down that road lies insanity, so I won't go there. :-) In the United States, the Supreme Court has rather strongly rejected the idea that copyright protects the time you put into the work. This was called the "sweat of the brow" theory, and was firmly rejected in _Feist v. Rural Telephone_. Copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. If you don't have an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression, you can sweat all you want, and you get bubkis. On the other hand, if you *do* have an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression, you've got protection even if you produced the work with the most trivial of effort. --Tim Smith ps: if anyone's curious, the _Fiest_ case concerned a company that produced a telephone book by taking another companies white pages and copying them outright. The second company had went to considerable effort to gather the data, but since the didn't use any creative method to select the data (e.g., the list consisted of everyone who they sold telephone service to), and they didn't use any creative method to arrange the data (they listed it in alphabetical order), it was not a work of authorship (authorship implies at least some creativity), and so there was no copyright protection.