4 ms·
cough Actually, distribution and COPY (i.e., reproduction) rights are at the heart of copyright law. She has every right to control distribution of her works.
by fatdog789 18y ago
cough
Actually, distribution and COPY (i.e., reproduction) rights are at the heart of copyright law.
She has every right to control distribution of her works.
Do not confuse the copyrightability of ideas with the copyrightability of an expression.
BTW, every court that has seen this sort of case has ruled that a fictional fact or character is considered an expression, not an idea.
IDEA = boy goes to a school for child wizards
EXPRESSION = harry potter (a specific example of the idea)
- tsally 18y agoIn writing (and I imagine in programming as well) every "expression" has been mimiced by some other author somewhere. Asimov has done extensive writing on this issue, and as he makes clear, it's not nearly as black and white as you are implying.
- unalone 18y agoBut an "expression" as a unit is meaningless. The value comes from putting it all together as a whole, which is several orders of magnitude harder than figuring out each instance separately.
- decode 18y ago"Do not confuse the copyrightability of ideas with the copyrightability of an expression." I'm pretty sure I wasn't doing that, but I don't think you read my comment very carefully or followed the link I posted, so I'm going to assume you just misunderstood me. "every court that has seen this sort of case has ruled that a fictional fact or character is considered an expression, not an idea" I interpret Warner Bros. Pictures v. Columbia Broadcasting Sys., 216 F.2d 945 (9th Cir. 1954) to have gone the other way. Do you disagree?