John Chase replied to my defense of software patents, and my mention that I had a software patent pending, with "What does a patent do for your software 'invention' that copyright does not? I.e., why is copyright not sufficient?"
Since the IBM-PSI thread had drifted so much, I decided to start a new one. John, I'll be happy to answer your question. Copyright protects "literary expression," and until recently, copyright protection for software was controversial. Until Congress specifically clarified the law, the Copyright Office used to have this delightful form which called the copyrightablility of software a "dubious proposition" but went on to say that they resolved all dubious cases in favor of copyrightability, and so were accepting software copyright registrations. Anyway, copyrighting software protects the "expression," not the function. It's like a poem comparing love to a rose: copyright protects the particular poetic expression, but not the concept of the similarity of love and roses. So copyright is great for protecting screen design, where the point is the expression, not the function. (You can copyright the design but not the function of displaying, e.g., a customer account number and address.) Copyright protects source code against theft (not to say it is the entire solution to all code theft problems) because a stolen copy of the source code would inherently infringe on the original copy's expression. It protects object code on the theory that loading it into memory constitutes a (possibly unauthorized) copy of the work. My invention is not the expression of the code that embodies it. Thanks, John, this is a great example. I am about to tell you how my invention works. I could not do that if the only protection were a copyright on the source code, because you could easily write your own code that implemented the invention, and did not infringe on my potentially copyrighted source code, because it would be expressed in original form. But because I have a patent pending, my invention itself is protected from theft, and I can share 100% of how it works with you today. The invention is in the field of the prevention of software piracy. It is most suited for protecting consumer software, not commercial software. Much consumer software is protected with a "key." You download the software, you try it, you pay for it, you get a "key" that enables it. But there is little to prevent you from sharing that key with your brother, your friends, or on a bulletin board. In my invention, the software requires the entry of two things to enable it: a key that is supplied by the vendor, AND the credit card number you used to buy the software. The key is constructed by the vendor from a hash of the product code and your credit card number. The purchased software re-computes the hash and compares it to the entered key. So you see, you *might* be willing to share the key AND your credit card number with your brother, but you're certainly not going to share your credit card number with random friends or on a bulletin board, and piracy is thereby discouraged. Is the invention the solution to all piracy issues? Of course not. I'm not going to go into all the possible "what-ifs" here because the point of this note is not a discussion of my invention, but rather an attempt, I hope successful, to answer the question "What does a patent do for your software 'invention' that copyright does not? I.e., why is copyright not sufficient?" The answer is that a copyright on particular source code would do little or nothing to protect my invention; a patent is on the other hand entirely appropriate. www.ciKeep.com if anyone is interested. If you wanted to enter into a discussion of the plusses and minuses of the invention, as opposed to a discussion of broader software intellectual property protection, I would suggest that a private correspondence would be the proper place. Charles Mills ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
