Re: copyright under stress

On Thu, Jun 15, 2000, Robert Cumbow <rcumbow[_at_]grahamdunn.com> wrote:
>
> [...]
> That is a basic tenet of trade secret law, not copyright law. The
> opposite is a tenet of copyright law: when you register a copyright
> you are REQUIRED to make the work accessible by depositing a copy
> of the work in the Library of Congress which will be accessible as
> part of the public record. In respect of the tension between the
> need for trade secret protection and the public interest served by
> copyright law, the Library of Congress allows deposits of source
> code to be redacted by up to 49%, so they cannot be copied by
> competitors. But that does not make restriction of access a
> "tenet" of copyright.

I don't know that I'd characterize it as a tenet of copyright, but copyright protection does extend to unpublished works and reserves to the author the discretion to publish or not publish. While registration requires a deposit, copyright protection is not limited to registered works.

On 6/17/2000, Eric Eldred <eldred[_at_]eldritchpress.org> wrote:
>
> Again, that's probably the way the law SHOULD be. But Microsoft
> is clearly claiming that the law is NOT that way, and they are
> clearly using copyright in an attempt to restrict access. If
> you read their statement, you will see that Microsoft is stating
> straight out that ANY revelation of code, whether it be partial,
> full, or just APIs, is NOT ONLY a violation of their trade secrets,
> but a violation of their COPYRIGHT.

What's the conflict? Trade secret law prohibits the unauthorized appropriation of a trade secret. Copyright law prohibits the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of an original expression of the trade secret. Court-ordered publication of source code can amount to both an impairment of trade secret protection, and an impairment of the exclusive right to distribute an original expression of the trade secret under copyright law.

John Noble
<jnoble[_at_]dgsys.com> Received on Mon Jun 19 2000 - 20:19:25 GMT