Copywrite laws are they to vague?

[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Will:
Well, I had a response written for your post, but I seemed to have hit "Add Reply" about five minutes after the forums went all narcoleptic... so my response essentially went *POOF!*.

Been there - a lot. I've taken to using the clipboard and notepad to save my larger Posts before actually posting them to prevent just that.

Originally posted by Will:

The gist of it: I never said you were confused, I said you were misunderstanding what I posted. Confused would be the recipient having reduced mental faculties (I would consider saying confused in that situation unwarranted and an insult). Misunderstanding is a problem in the act of communication (and has absolutely no malice behind it), something being lost in the translation, so to speak.

You're right; you did say misunderstanding. Sorry about that.

Originally posted by Will:

To attempt to rehash my position on the limits to be put on copyright (not even going to touch trademarks or patents here, that's a completely different 900-pound purple gorilla): Copyright should protect against what is commonly accepted as plagerism, but nothing beyond that. That means that no significant portion of the copyright-protected work can be used by someone else. With the changing-menu-color example, that would violate copyrights because the rest of the game most certainly constitutes "significant". However, if the game was reverse-engineered, and every piece of it was created independantly, taking nothing but inspiration from the original, then that does not violate the copyright.

You are talking about "should not," correct? Such an implementation would pretty much only benefit the big corporations; if a small-time develper produces something, the big corporation could throw a million at it to duplicate it from scratch, then throw a few more million to advertise it, and pretty soon everyone is buying the big corporation's Version, forgetting where it came from, even though it is exactly like the original. A very large portion of the time spent developing a game is put into the design work; having the original as the design would eliminate most of that phase. A perfect clone could be put out, and even take over, in perhaps six months. Then, the creator of the original goes bankrupt, unable to compete with the corporation. The megacorps would love to be able to do that; it would be the perfect tool for driving small competiters out of business; reverse-engeneer everything they put out and distribute it for free. While driving the small competitor out of business, the megacorp can absorb the loss (they absorb the loss from most of the software they put out anyway - a few more aren't going to hurt them). After, the megacorp can mop up the market.

Originally posted by Will:
Another example: say a writer has a terrible case of writers block. The writer comes across a short story done by someone else, and begins writing with the story as a model; the writer doesn't take a single sentance fragment from the original, but does use the same characters (with different names), plot, setting, etc. That, in my view, is more than a bit unoriginal, but should not violate copyright... the writer's story is its own, nothing tangible was taken from the "original". (As a side note, I would personally think it proper to let the "original's" author and any readers know about the source of the story idea, but I don't think that should be mandated by copyright law).

That is different from the case of copying software from scratch; with the case of a story, it is the wording that is important for copyright issues (as that is what the user sees), especially considering that most ideas in print have their roots in other ideas in print. Using not one scrap of the originals wording will invariably produce a vastly different story. With the case of software, it is possible to completely duplicate something without the source code and without duplicating the binary. However, the design (which would be duplicated in your case) isn't dependant on any specific bit of code being done in a particular fashion (barring the standard things to deal with the hardware and OS that virtually every program for a particular hardware/OS combination use, of course).

Originally posted by Will:

Also, there should be leeway given for personal use. There is already some in the current laws, but certain Groups are trying their damnedest to remove all personal copying. I think it's perfectly acceptable to do things like: make a backup copy of a CD, photocopy a poem and stick it on your wall, take a hex editor to SEIV and change menu colors (not to distribute, mind you!), multiple installations of software (several people on this board have more than one installation of SEIV on their computer), copy a DVD onto a VHS cassette so you can watch it with the VCR in the other room, etc. Not only are these legitimate uses in my view, but if copyright holders actually bother trying to collect payment for things so utterly trivial, then they seriously need to be institutionalized.

Most of those actually are legal at this point for private individuals: backups (if not distributed), medium conVersions (this one covers both the poem-on-the-wall and DVD-to-VHS); however, multiple installations and editing the finished product aren't. No-multiple installations can be programmatically enforced reasonably well, and has some reasonable correlation with solid products - if you wanted to use a toaster in five different locations, you would either need to buy more toasters or carry one of them around with you and plug/unplug it every time.

But yes, trying to make those legal ones illegal is quite the power grab.