[Gllug] OT: Copyright and Snow Balls

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 12:00:03PM +0000, Ian Scott wrote:
> but I do not have a problem with the principle of being able to
> copyright an artistic idea.  And I can certainly see the argument
> that if you use imagery that is closely associated with an artist
> (e.g. Dali's egg watches, Hirst's formaldehyded sheep) it looks like
> the artist has endorsed the ad.

No, I'm sorry. This is really a problem.

If you can copyright something as nebulous (and, IMHO, daft) as
melting snowballs, then by extension we're going to see people
copyrighting:

* User interfaces (wanna make a competitor to Outlook or Office so that
  people won't need much retraining? - sorry, you're SOL)

* Unix (yes, all "Unix-like" things such as Linux become derived works)

* Win32 (need to reimplement the Win32 API to allow programs to run on
  your competing OS?)

This is far beyond the original intentions of copyright.

And even worse, (a) copyright last effectively forever, and (b)
copyright isn't invalidated by "obviousness" or "prior art".

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
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