3 ms·

Patents and copyright are completely different. Copyright protects a specific work - you could write a book that has exactly the same plot and characters as The

by brazzy 14y ago

Patents and copyright are completely different. Copyright protects a specific work - you could write a book that has exactly the same plot and characters as The Great Gatsby, and as long as you use different sentences and names, it would not be copyright infringement (just look at the cookie-cutter ripoffs of Shades of Grey - and for each one that's published, the editor rejected 30 more). If you have a patent on some mechanism, nobody else is allowed to use that mechanism without your approval, and minor variations are not sufficient to bypass that.

kvb 14y ago
Your broader point is a good one, but my understanding (though IANAL) is that while copyright does protect the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself, exactly where to draw the line is a bit of a fuzzy area (see "substantial similarity"[1]). It's not just a work exactly as it was expressed - a written work might infringe even with different names and wording. One test that has been proposed is if "the ordinary observer, unless he set out to detect the disparities, would be disposed to overlook them, and regard [the] aesthetic appeal [of the two works] as the same". On the other hand scenes that are required by the genre generally aren't protected even if they're copied pretty closely (according to scène à faire doctrine[2]). [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire
- SEMW 14y ago
  We should be careful about conflating principle and evidence. That looks like an evidential test to help a court decide whether copying had taken place. If you turn up with what looks like a tweaked copy of Harry Potter claiming you wrote it yourself, no-one's going to believe you -- but if you did somehow manage to prove it on the balance of probabilities (e.g. you've lived your whole life in a sealed metal box and can prove you've never read Harry Potter or something), then you're fine, you've rebutted the evidential presumption.

by brazzy 14y ago

kvb 14y ago

Your broader point is a good one, but my understanding (though IANAL) is that while copyright does protect the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself, exactly where to draw the line is a bit of a fuzzy area (see "substantial similarity"[1]). It's not just a work exactly as it was expressed - a written work might infringe even with different names and wording. One test that has been proposed is if "the ordinary observer, unless he set out to detect the disparities, would be disposed to overlook them, and regard [the] aesthetic appeal [of the two works] as the same". On the other hand scenes that are required by the genre generally aren't protected even if they're copied pretty closely (according to scène à faire doctrine[2]). [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire

SEMW 14y ago
We should be careful about conflating principle and evidence. That looks like an evidential test to help a court decide whether copying had taken place. If you turn up with what looks like a tweaked copy of Harry Potter claiming you wrote it yourself, no-one's going to believe you -- but if you did somehow manage to prove it on the balance of probabilities (e.g. you've lived your whole life in a sealed metal box and can prove you've never read Harry Potter or something), then you're fine, you've rebutted the evidential presumption.