I thought the article had a good point about trying to take something as quantitative as computer science and trying to put patents on it and protect it. I think that the author's link to Monolith had a great quote in it. It said that: "The real world of copyright does not operate in a legal fashion." That was, to me, the main thesis of this article; that no matter how we try to merge (or blend, heh) copyright and computer science, we're always going to be sacrificing a little soul on either end, and that we can't really put the "color" into the computer science any more than we could flawlessly shove computer science into current copyright laws.
Here is the article in question: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
What exactly do you mean by soul? I think I agree with you, I just want to make sure I'm thinking what you're thinking.
ReplyDeleteOh I'm thinking that no matter what we try, when reconciling them we're losing out on something on either the computer science or the copyright side. For instance, if someone is awarded a patent for something that is commonly done, like IBM's drop-down menus, then we're hurting computer science because any other solution would look something like a drop-down menu. On the other hand, if we treated computer science like music and said that so long as someone changed 7 lines of code per program, it would be considered o.k. then all of our programs would look similar.
ReplyDeleteThanks for asking me to clarify! I need the feedback :P