RE: DOES ANYONE OWN SYNTAX?
RE: DOES ANYONE OWN SYNTAX?
Sent: 12/6/96; 1:04:26 PM
From: dan@gui.com (Dan Shafer)
Dave....
Your discussion of copyright of instruction code syntax is interesting and timely but your choice of the Tate case as an example was off point (as a lawyer would say). That case never decided the underlying issue of whether the instruction set syntax _could_ be copyrighted; it only dealt with the fact that Tate, in applying for protection for its code syntax, failed to disclose prior art on which it was based, therefore invalidating their original claim.
I'm not sure, but I _believe_ that courts have held that instruction sets are in fact copyrightable. I think Intel won a suit on this point surrounding its 8080 instruction set in the 70's or early 80's. That may have been slightly off point as well, since there we'd be dealing with something encoded in hardware and therefore less subject to the question of what is protected.
Your example is actually a sub-set of the larger topic of user convenience vs. intellectual property protection and the market implications. The Lotus-Borland suit is another example. So was Apple v Microsoft.
If I'm not mistaken -- and, again I caution, I'm not a lawyer -- the courts have agreed on very little except:
o if the material at issue is legitimately protected, then it's protected against any kind of infringementm, market pressures and user convenience aside o if the material at issue isn't legitimately protected, there's no issue
FWIW, I doubt any court would find that a product that _translates_ codes into a new syntax one time would constitute an infringement. That's the route I think these folks should go. A one-time translation has the additional effect of breaking dependence on the first vendor.
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