[OT] Where ill conceived copyright laws can lead

[Richmond]

On 11/10/12 23:40, Bob Sneidar wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2012, at 12:39 PM, Richmond wrote:
>
>> 3. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, I am a brilliant computer program (that will be my only
>> joke in this posting, I promise) and I make a complete clone of RunRev Livecode from scratch:
>>
>> virtually looks the same, functions the same, opens Livecode files and runs them, and so forth,
>> but is NOT Livecode
>>
>> one wonders how near to the wind I would actually be sailing.
>>
>> ---------------------
>>
>> Or, put it another way, if Shakespeare were alive could he sue the pants off the producers of 'Westside Story' because they ripped-off 'Romeo and Juliet'?
>
> Or put it yet another way. Since Solomon coined the phrase, "There's nothing new under the sun", shouldn't we all be paying his descendants royalties on every idea we have?

It's funny really, when he supposedly have hundreds of wives, how hard 
it is to track down anybody
who can actually, honestly say they are descended from him . . . LOL.

>
> Bob
>
>

A little philosophical exercise called 'reductio ad absurdam' (correct 
my Latin someone)
(pushing a thing to its limits) is useful sometimes to help us 
understand how far something can go,
and how fuzzy the boundaries tend to be as to what is 'in' and what is 
'out'.

I feel there should be more precisely defined copyright rules, a statute 
of how far one can
stretch copyright, and areas that should ruled off-limits as belonging 
to the collective
knowledge and/or cultural property of a society.

The recent spat over whether one of the major mobile devices has nicked 
parts of their GUI from
another is an example of how copyright is not used to protect but to bully.

Richmond.