Page 56 - January 2006

patents is the loose (or nonexistent) definition of derivative works. But with patents, it all depends upon how the judge chooses to view the claims.
Greg: Copyright law is much worse. Not until a copyright trial, when a judge (or his expert) does an abstractioning, where he creates the equivalent of claims, do you have any notice of what the boundaries are. I have a right to know which of the ideas in the source code I can freely use. At least with patents, you get to see the claims before trial, when the patent issues. But with copyright, you are at the whims of a judge untrained in software to create the “claims” while you are being sued.
So if patent litigation is bad, copyright litigation is worse because a judge during trial first has to create the claims before the equivalent of a patent lawsuit occurs. For more on copyright abstractioning, examine Google for the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test from a case titled Computer Associates v. Altai.
Open source proponents choose copyright because that is what Stallman chose for GPL in the mid 1980s. At the
time, protecting software via patents and copyright was still in flux as the courts figured out what to do. People like Stallman and the Patent Office hoped the courts would negate software patents and shift protection over to copy- right. The courts did the exact opposite; greatly expanding software patenting and greatly limiting copyright (Lotus v. Borland, for example).
Thus, questions like “what is copyrightable in a source code,” “what is a derivative,” remain completely unanswered, partly because many are afraid that the answer in each case is “not much” and “who knows.” For GPL to rest on copyright is sheer lunacy—a good patent litigator could shred the license in a court case.AT
Editor’s Note—The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, Acoustics Today, or the Acoustical Society of America.
6,845,840
43.38.Tj SURFACE MOUNTED LOUDSPEAKER AND BRACKET FOR THE MOUNTING THEREOF
Jeffrey N. Cowan et al., assignors to Boston Acoustics, Incorporated 25 January 2005 (Class 181/150); filed 9 August 2001
A means is described of attaching a loudspeaker enclosure of a certain form in many different orientations while also providing “good aesthetics.” Question: how many domestic divas would concur with the adjective “good” as applied in this context?—NAS
54 Acoustics Today, January 2006