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No. I thought copyrights protect literary and visual illustrations, but not any underlying processes, mechanisms, or artifacts they describe (patents protect t
by tylerchr 6y ago
No.
I thought copyrights protect literary and visual illustrations, but not any underlying processes, mechanisms, or artifacts they describe (patents protect those). My understanding of copyright law is surely flawed, and perhaps the “original work” standard means that only descriptions of systems are copyrightable and not the systems themselves.
In that case I agree that my examples fail. Keys and clutches are mechanisms and filling gas is a process, and those aren’t copyrightable (but they are patentable). The file format example fails too, because the concept of laying out data in a particular way is a mere idea, and ideas aren’t copyrightable either (they are also not patentable, though a description of the format is copyrightable and a specific process for reading or writing the file might be patentable if it were nontrivial).
- sergeykish 6y agoI've specifically mentioned GIF, MP3 protected by patents. MP3 patents encoding-decoding. > GIF images are compressed using the Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985. [1] x86 protected by patents: > Partly. For some advanced features, x86 may require license from Intel; x86-64 may require an additional license from AMD. The 80486 processor has been on the market for more than 20 years and so cannot be subject to patent claims. The pre-586 subset of the x86 architecture is therefore fully open. [2] One can build/emulate 80486 but not x86-64, SSE, AVX, VT-x etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86