Another only partially related issue was copyright moving from the code
itself to the "look and feel" of the finished product.
Am I correct that it used to be possible to write a Puck-boy game that was
hard to tell from it, IF the code was original. Hence lots of
"clean-room/double-blind reverse engineering", to produce identically
functioning products without using, or even seeing, the source code.
I doubt that it was the ONLY case, but that was the issue for Adam
Osborne's Paperback Software, which made a Lotus clone.
Since then, it has to look different also.
Lotus did not like that the menu choices in Paperback's products were the
same ones.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
On Thu, 2 Jan 2020, Eric Smith via cctalk wrote:
On Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 4:44 AM W2HX via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
software is currently non-patentable. Not sure the order of when it
was/wasnt but currently is not.
I don't know anything about patents in other countries, but in the USA,
software is _definitely_ patentable, and has been since the 1970s. It was
ruled in 1853 that an abstract idea apart from its implementation is not
patentable (O'Reilly v. Morse). However, it has later been considered that
software is (or at least can be) more than just an abstract idea (Diamond
v. Diehr 1981).
What changed recently is that SCOTUS ruled in Alice Corp. V. CLS Bank
International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014) that taking some existing process or
business practice and doing exactly the same thing with a computer or
software involved is NOT a new patentable invention.
