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Originally posted by baltassoc
If there is one thing that I feel strongly about, it's that patent attorneys should stick to patents and stay the fuck away from trademark and copyright law.
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Heh. 2.
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Correct, at least for consumer software and mass market business software. For custom stuff, not so much.
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2. (As an aside, you can probably count on both hands the number of tech companies that go through the trouble of filing for copyright protection in their software, legal advice notwithstanding.)
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Besides the recent actions of the Justice Department, the last reported criminal case of which I am aware in copyright is from the '70s and reads like a rejected script for Starsky and Hutch. It sounds good in the demand letters, but its a pretty empty threat.
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There were a couple of (failed) DMCA cases recently, but fair point anyway. Those cases read like rejected scripts also.
It's all a moot point anyway -- copyright protection is useful largely to deter blatant pirates, and those too lazy to rewrite the code without wholesale copying. The real problem ahead, unfortunately, is in
patents.
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And how'd we get sucked into this stupid topic, anyway? First day of the RNC, and this is the best stuff they can bring?
