Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
@pwalker8 and @DuckieTigger. Your discussion highlights some of the very real problems with intellectual property law. No longer do such laws require some significant real invention or innovation. The maxim that ideas alone should not be protected seems too often to be honoured in the breech rather than the observance. And, of course, the length of some protections is just ridiculous. The nature of software development is such that it sits very uneasily with intellectual property constructions, particularly when fragments of products qualify for protection. It is of course desirable to have some protection for software. But in my view software patents do significant damage. Protecting a method of doing something as distinct from its implementation is ridiculous. And copyright is very ill-suited for its purpose. It applies to the source code as if it was a book. And the binary is of course derived from that source code. As for the binary itself, I would have thought that copyrighting a series of 0's and 1's lacks originality and is artificial to the extreme. And in the fast moving world of IT intellectual property terms for the life of an individual plus in my view just don't make sense. Particularly when we are talking not about complex programs but sub-routines and modules and basically code designed specifically for re-use. And of course API's. The whole area is long overdue for a comprehensive review. Unfortunately any new system would likely be heavily influenced by the lobbying of the usual suspects.
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Yep, all true.
One of the issues is that when people started going down the IP route, there really isn't a limiting principle. Everything "deserves" protection now and once they start getting protection, they loath to give it up, which keeps pushing the length of protection.