On Wed, Nov 28, 2001, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote about "RE: making a non-GPLed module": > I don't agree. I can't publish a sequeul to "Gone with the Wind" under my name and >using the original characters. The copyright owners would sue me and win (this had >happend in the US, btw). For this reason I believe that the argument you brought is >not correct. But it is interesting, never the less - I'll ask my lawyer and let you >all know ;-)
This is probably a gray area of copyright, where you accuse someone not of stealing your text (or code) per se, but rather stealing some "essence" of your creation - like the characters of Gone with the Wind, or the likeness of Mickey Mouse. I'm not sure if these claims involve copyright, or rather things like trademarks or patents (in the software case). In any case, it isn't very relevant to what I was saying in my post. The closest software parallel I can think of to the situation you describe is some company suing another because the *ideas* of "windows", "mouse", "icons", "file names with slashes" and stuff like that were invented by the other company and have come to be recognized as part of that other company's product. I think Apple and Microsoft battled over such stuff, and nobody ever "won". Will Microsoft sue me if I create another operating system with all of Windows' characteristics, i.e., expensive, crashes a lot, appeals to I-can't-invest-more-than-5-minutes-in-learning users, virus-compatible, and pathnames start with C:\ ? :) -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Nov 28 2001, 14 Kislev 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed http://nadav.harel.org.il |'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
