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Originally posted by astro:
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Originally posted by thedecline:
Copyright experts: can you just put a Š on something and write "copyright (owner) 1999) on something you've created (like a web page or game, or plug) and that is enough to make it your own (in legal terms) or do you have to go out and get patent pending and register the darn thing (for money)?
at least in the US, copyright protection applies automatically to any expression. a registered copyright is simply a presumption that you created the expression. it's useful when you expect other people to claim they created the same or similar expressions.
in contrast, an idea is subject to patent protection only by going through the formal process of filing a patent. remember, copyrights protect expression, and patents protect ideas.
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Absolutely. If you wrote it, and can convince the court you wrote it (created it solely by your own efforts) then you own copyright. Assuming, of course, that you did not build upon or borrow material that did not belong to you to create it; aka no court in the land would allow you to copyright a Star Trek fan story.
The patent of ideas, as Martin pointed out, is really a patent for process. You can't patent the idea of a cure for cancer; you can only patent an actual cure (whether it actually works is another matter).
But then there's the lovely subject of "Fair Use," of which the lawyers are fond of saying "There is no bright line." For all practical purposes it is up to the individual court to decide if your derivitive work is legitimate through being a parody, an academic quotation, an original work merely resembling the registered property, etc, etc.
For instance, there is the case of Star Wars vs. Battlestar Galactica. They lost in court when it was convincingly proven that both had drawn from older sources; the science fiction of the 30's, 40's and 50's.
For another instance, commercial radio stations go by a 4-bar rule where they assume they can play up to (but not exceeding) 4 bars of any music without aquiring rights thereof. This doesn't stand on any actual legal ground but it seems to be accepted by both industry and court. On the other hand, every time you sing "Happy Birthday" you technically owe Michael Jackson a nickel. As far as I know he has never made an effort to collect, however...
So. In an SF novel I wrote a few years back I made mention of a Moravec in orbit. This lovely concept was described by Hans Moravec and should be properly credited to him, but me placing one as a minor element in a story is quite certainly fair use. Had I made the Moravec the center of the story, as Niven did with Ringworld, I might be in trouble. In rather the same theme, Star Trek Next Generation named ships Yamato, Kei and Yuri, and even put "Marty Fly" on a gravestone in one episode.
I also gave some of the characters (all who have Japanese surnames) strangely-colored hair. I certainly don't expect 40,000 manga artists and animators, led by the ghost of Osamu Tezuka, to descend on me claiming the "anime" look is protected copyright. This is the "Galactica" defence, or more properly the "Puff-n-Stuff" defence (they failed in court, but argued well). It is the defence by which every minor SF epic can have people teleporting in and out of ships as long as they never call it a "Transporter" and take care to make sure it looks different from the Star Trek model (and, no, no-one worries about Niven's "Stepping Disks" or Bester's "Jaunting" or the "Portal System" from Schmidtz...) It is the defence that, basically, space ships and beam weapons and the whole basic apparatus of cheap SF goes back well before Gernsback and can't be the protected property of any recent user.
Lastly, I still intend to go forward (some day) with my own mac vs. PC plug. Why? Because the idea in an of iteself is hardly original. I could point to quite a few games, comics, stories, humorous pieces, essays by Umberto Ecco, ad nas. on the same theme. What will make an EV plug with this idea fail or succeed, meet the test of originality or fail, is whether I have anything truly new to say on the subject.
My, what a wander this post is. I'm starting to take after ellrx. Well, let me close with the simple and effective rule of thumb; "If you feel like you are stealing....don't."
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Butterfly
My husband gave his promise
He would return in the joyous season,
When robin red-breasts rebuild their nests.
Seriously though, I take any chance I can to divulge my enormous "Star Trek" physics knowledge 