"Nadav Har'El" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 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 ;-) Please do. ;-) > 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. Characters are often copyrighted and trademarked. If you saw any Harry Potter merchandise, to take a recent example, then you probably saw (but maybe never paid attention to) the prominent statement that the characters involved are tm and copyright of Warner Bros. This means that if you decide to write, e.g. a completely original computer game that borrows nothing at all from the plot of the books or the movie, you would be in violation. I don't know how long this protection holds - there is always a limit. Both "Gone With The Wind" and "Mickey" go back to the thirties, I believe (though Mickey was probably very active later). We are talking of a very young penguin here though. This is probably how "Scarlet" (an original sequel to GWTW) appeared. Either that, or it was by permission of the copyright holders. On the other hand, the Chaplin commercials (of the lottery) popular in Israel a few years ago were taken off because of the copyright of Charlie's image. > 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:\ ? :) There was a look-and-feel case which, IIRC, M$ won. Some sife effects included *nix window managers that looked like Win95, as those of us who are old enough remember. Come to think of it, I believe there is a Windows theme in KDE... -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] "If it ain't broken, it has not got enough features yet." ================================================================= 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]
