Lots of confusion here. 1. US and EU are of course different. Laws and precedents don't matter much from one to the other.
2. Copyright in the US has never protected programming language specifications, etc. Google Lotus v. Borland, the seminal case, which went all the way to SCOTUS. 3. Copyright and Patent are way different. Copyright is trivially easy to get and protects expression: think of poetry. Copyright protects a particular COBOL manual and compiler source code but not the concepts and functions of COBOL. Patents are very hard to get and protect function. This decision has no relationship to patents (except that it reaffirms that copyright does not protect the things that only a patent would protect). 4. "Intellectual Property" is the name of the kind of stuff copyrights and patents protect. It is not a form of protection of its own. "Personal property" is not a form of protection, but personal property is protected by theft laws. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Hal Merritt Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2012 10:01 AM To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Subject: Re: Programming languages can't have copyright protection, EU court rules I'm not a lawyer and don't pretend to understand the ramifications, but this sounds huge. "The result is that the court finds that ideas and principles which underlie any element of a computer program are not protected by copyright under that directive, only the expression of those ideas and principles." What does the above really mean? Can one replicate the 'look and feel' without copyright issues in the EU now? In the US, there is the concept of 'intellectual property' that seems to protect ideas from theft. Does that now mean open season in the EU? Or am I confusing copyright with patents? Granted, I currently think that the US patent system is broken, but this seems a bit of an over kill. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
