On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 9:11 AM, Rob Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Then if your design is used to produce "useful articles," you can appeal to > the community and make the purloining company look bad.
The precedent (actually the lack of it) makes things amazingly *un*clear, regardless of how clear the language itself seems to be. So far, practically, it seems to be a gray area that has precedents whose various parallels strongly imply opposite outcomes. But whether we agree or not is kind of irrelevant :) Your advice makes plenty of sense. My point is primarily that Copyright protection exists without the filing and that, in the case of the kinds of $$ that would *likely* be involved if something like this were to reach litigation without a settlement, the registration issue is basically a moot point both in terms of the added capacity for liability recovery and the cost it would take to establish a precedent where currently nothing clear exists. Of course, there are always the parallel cases that are are in part outliers and in part cases that could provide more fodder for later decisions, such as Robert Lang / Sarah Morris... c -- Chris Lott <[email protected]>
