Dan Sugalski wrote: > > At 10:30 AM -0500 3/18/03, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >Erik Price wrote: > >> linguistic scholars have noticed that > >> throughout human history, there has > >> always been a trend of languages > >> diverging, rather than converging > > > >awk, sed, and a mish-mash of useful > >functionality converging into Perl > >would be a counter-example. > > While computer and human languages share many traits, > they aren't the same thing by any means.
they (computer and human languages) are considered fairly equally in the eyes of the law. both allow expressions that qualify for copyright protection. They are different in that while a human expression can only describe patentable functionality, a computer program can both describe and implement the functionality. Human languages can give purely functional expressions too. Food recipes can't be copyrighted because they're considered purely functional. (You can copyright a cookbook if you put in cutesy little stories that go with the recipes.) But it takes a human to parse, compile, and execute the recipe "program". Generally, the argument used to defend software cracks is that code is protected by freedom of speech, whereas execution of said code to spread a computer virus is illegal. This is the same argument that protects the Anarchist's Cookbook as freedom of speech, separating the difference between expressing knowledge about a topic and using that knowledge to perform illegal acts. Greg _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
