4 ms·

are there a lot of companies in the practice of copyrighting their internal architecture and patterns?

njharman 11y ago
In usa everything that is copyrightable, becomes copyrighted at moment it is created. For instance that sentence, and this on, are protected works owned by me. The only reAson HN can legally use then is cause I gave them license, buried somewhere in Eula/site terms of use. Also, an architecture is not copyrightable. Maybe patentable. Copyrights protect specific expressions, not a general idea, plan, or architecture. At least not yet thankfully I haven't seen anyone try to argue an unrelated software doing same thing is a derivative work.
- mavelikara 11y ago
  But Twitter has a patent pledge with its engineers [1]: The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended. [1]: https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-the-innovator-s-patent-agreement https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-the-innovator-s-pa...
jedberg 11y ago
Many big companies will patent their internal architectures. I've been involved in the creation of quite a few patent applications of exactly that. My name is even on one of them. It's silly and ridiculous but necessary because of the way patents are enforced. I can promise you that the existence of the patent system did not motivate us to build any of that software, but it certainly motivated us to patent it after the fact, so that someone else couldn't patent it and then sue us for having independently built the same thing.

In usa everything that is copyrightable, becomes copyrighted at moment it is created. For instance that sentence, and this on, are protected works owned by me. The only reAson HN can legally use then is cause I gave them license, buried somewhere in Eula/site terms of use. Also, an architecture is not copyrightable. Maybe patentable. Copyrights protect specific expressions, not a general idea, plan, or architecture. At least not yet thankfully I haven't seen anyone try to argue an unrelated software doing same thing is a derivative work.

mavelikara 11y ago
But Twitter has a patent pledge with its engineers [1]: The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended. [1]: https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-the-innovator-s-patent-agreement https://blog.twitter.com/2012/introducing-the-innovator-s-pa...

jedberg 11y ago

Many big companies will patent their internal architectures. I've been involved in the creation of quite a few patent applications of exactly that. My name is even on one of them. It's silly and ridiculous but necessary because of the way patents are enforced. I can promise you that the existence of the patent system did not motivate us to build any of that software, but it certainly motivated us to patent it after the fact, so that someone else couldn't patent it and then sue us for having independently built the same thing.