bill lam wrote: > IMO J dictionary is copyrighted as a 'book' so that its translation > into other human languages still being copyrighted. But computer > software is copyrighted or patented separately. IANAL.
Patents protect IDEAS (including processes), and copyrights protect EXPRESSIONS of ideas. The copyright of DOJ protects the exact wordings found there but not the ideas found there. If a person were to copy massive chunks (usually, more than 10%) of the copyrighted work, rearranging them in different orders or inserting their own further explanations between DOJ sentences and/or paragraphs, for example, that would be a derivative work, needing the permission of the copyright holder. On the other hand, if a person were to write their own definitions and examples and such, that is not a derivative work because none of the original wordings were used in the new work. Only some (or even all) of the original ideas may have been used as the basis, but not the wordings (expressions) of those ideas. Having said that, I'm not sure if the primitives and their names are copyrighted (or even copyrightable) since they are the ONLY way to express those particular ideas. (Courts tend not to give patent/copyright protection when there's one and only one way of doing/saying something. Normally, copyright protects ONE way of expressing an idea when there are other ways to express the same idea without copying it verbatim.) I, too, am not a lawyer, but, being a former librarian, it was a responsibility to stay up to date on such issues. Harvey ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
