Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!kddlab!atr-la!geddis From: geddis@atr-la.atr.junet (Donald F. Geddis) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: Work for Hire contracts Summary: Can't copyright expressions Message-ID: <2374@atr-la.atr.junet> Date: 18 Aug 88 07:21:49 GMT References: <25638@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <730058@hpcilzb.HP.COM> Organization: ATR International,Japan Lines: 29 In article <730058@hpcilzb.HP.COM>, tedj@hpcilzb.HP.COM (Ted Johnson) writes: > Lets get serious though. How far can they take this? If I write > an abs(x) function for one company, does that mean that I can't > ever ever use this piece of code again????!!!! > > -Ted I believe that you can only copyright a particular exact thing, not the outside form that it takes. Thus, while you might not be allowed to reuse the exact code, there's absolutely nothing wrong with writing another function that returns the mathematical absolute value of an integer. Ideas can't be copyrighted. Of course in this case it is trivial, so the code would probably be the same. Things are a lot different when you're talking about duplicating ROM code, for example, like trying to make another Mac without Apple. If the exact code is copied, it's illegal; but there's nothing wrong with reverse engineering. It's often quite difficult to judge which happened in a particular case, but original designers often put useless code in (like a picture, or the author's name) that wouldn't come up in a reverse engineered piece. If it's there, the code was copied. (I've heard that map makers do something similar: put a street or hill on their maps that doesn't actually exist.) -- Don -- "You lock the door, and throw away the key There's someone in my head, but it's not me." -- Pink Floyd Internet: Geddis@Score.Stanford.Edu (which is forwarded to Japan...) USnail: P.O. Box 4647, Stanford, CA 94309 USA