>> The reason that ideas are not protected is because?
>> 1. big corporations what the ideas
>> 2. the ideas are humans and human issue is not subject to copyright
>> 3. other
> 3. other. Eg, the first amendment.
Wrong. Many ideas are protectable, using the patent system. There are many copyright court decisions where someone was trying to protect an idea with copyright, and the courts a) denied them this, and b) mentioned that any such protection may be possible over in the patent system ("maybe" in the sense that the idea has to be novel, unobvious and have fully specified applications to be patentable).
For example, the illogic and impotence of using copyright to protect software ideas and applications, which became more and more apparent in the 1980s and early 1990s, led to the rapid growth of software patents in all of the 1990s. If the copyright courts were going to play patent games in their analysis (Computer Associates v. Altai), I suspect many people figured - what not just use the real thing.
Greg Aharonian Received on Wed Jun 18 2003 - 20:02:12 GMT
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