On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Benjamin Tomhave wrote:
Your assertion is also incorrect about patents. US copyright law protects all ideas, not just those patented. This is one of the main reasons that software patents are so hotly contested - they're largely unnecessary.
Intellectual property law in the US is a crazy mess, and based on your second sentence, I think you've mixed some up (as even IP lawyers do sometimes). Copyrights and patents are totally different aspects of IP law in the US, and copyright doesn't cover the same sorts of "things" that patent law covers. One of the most important things to understand about copyright is that you cannot copyright ideas (generally, copyright experts refer to an "instantiation of an idea" as something copyrightable). But don't take my word for it, see what the US copyright office has to say.. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ31.html So, since the GPL depends on copyright as its basis (since you can't put restricitons on the use of a "document" you don't hold the copyright to), taking people's ideas cannot be a violation of the GPL. That doesn't mean it's ethical to do so (or maybe even legal), but it's not a copyright violation, which I think was Javier's point. -- Public key #7BBC68D9 at | Shane Williams http://pgp.mit.edu/ | System Admin - UT iSchool =----------------------------------+------------------------------- All syllogisms contain three lines | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Therefore this is not a syllogism | www.ischool.utexas.edu/~shanew _______________________________________________ Nessus mailing list [email protected] http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus
