Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
You cannot copyright the idea of digitally storing texts.
|
Nope.
Protecting new ideas and methods is what *patents* are for.
Copyright is for protecting specific expressions of those ideas or methods.
A truly new and superior algorithm for digitally encoding audio would be patentable, not copyrightable. The software implementing that algorithm and the files they produced would be copyrightable.
Ebooks as a whole, however, were never patentable as they are an obvious derivation of microfiche and the works of Vannevar Bush in the 40's.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
They "might" have been patentable at that time but the patent would've expired long before the idea became practical. Once people started storing documents on computers in the 50's ebooks became an obvious (and non-patentable) invention.
(The first documented ebook was produced as a tray of punch cards.)
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/the-v...-think-it-was/