Brian, That is not how it works.
You can not copyright methods. You can however patent methods as long as you disclose them completely to the public and they are unique and work. Yea, try to keep someone from using your own publicly disclosed patented ideas from out trading you. How would you even know. Totally unworkable except to keep a company from including your patented code in their commercial product. A copyright would keep a magazine or a person from selling or giving away the code that embodies your trading ideas. But once again, once the cat is out of the bag too bad for you. You edge is trashed. The only practical way you can share your trading methods on a limited basis (for fun or profit) is to have a way to share the results without sharing the methods. This is the trade secret way. You have two choices. 1. Stream the results to who you want (which does not help AB). This puts a burden on you and may be impractical for use. 2. Hide the code from view and distribute it to those you want to have it (which does help AB sales if a new customer). I have things I will not distribute because they are particular to my trading edge which would be lost if duplicated by many. I might be willing to distribute them to a few if I could keep the methods secret. So others lose out, because I have no easy way to do that. I freely distribute generic code I write that helps others use Amibroker to implement their own trading ideas. If I were to charge for my trading platform, I would certainly want the code protected to protect my ideas from being pirated and to make sure the code did not get modified if I am responsible to maintain it. The motivation for encrypting AFL programs are no different than Tomasz's motivation for not making the source code for AB freely available to every customer. In some cases, the value of an AFL system may be much larger than the total value of AB itself. BR, Dennis On Dec 3, 2008, at 4:14 PM, brian_z111 wrote: > Trading knowledge is another matter ... I would sell my trading > ideas, if it suited me, and I would attempt to copyright the methods > (once again that would be difficult to do) but the code I use to > express, or implement those ideas can't and/or shouldn't be > copyrighted IMO. >
