"Michael Black"  wrote:
>You're badly confused about copyrights.

Doubtful.

http://www.robic.ca/publications/Pdf/032E-LC.pdf

>You have absolutely no right to someone's copyrighted work, whether it'sin 
>Canada or anywhere else.

Untrue.

Canada's Doctrine of Fair Dealing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCH_Canadian_Ltd._v._Law_Society_of_Upper_Canada

On Canadian Soil, I have every right to use anyone's copyrighted work for 
research or private study. In fact under some circumstances even for 
commercial study.

Mr. Black, please familiarize yourself with the subject before making 
further personal accusations that I am confused.

I understand fully the difference between Copyright and Patent. Here's one 
of my articles published about 10 years ago that might help you a little 
with your own confusion (you can download the rest of this as part of the 
ClipShop help file at http://www.clipshop.ca/)

And by all means use this program for research and private study.

Good Day Eh!

Bill

x--- snip ---x

PrintMaster® and The The Print Shop® "at War"

Broderbund Software, Inc. v. Unison World, Inc., 648 F.Supp. 1127 (N.D. Cal. 
1986) (interface of program which generated customized greeting cards 
copyrightable). "It was actually a landmark case in intellectual property 
case law, I'm told."

The Print Shop® Won

The Print Shop® and PrintMaster® did not get along as well in the Early Days 
as they do now. On October 8, 1986, the U.S. District Court, Northern 
District of California ruled in a court case between Broderbund Software, 
Inc., and Pixellite Software v. Unison World, Inc. and gave an Opinion and 
Order in favor of The Print Shop® and against PrintMaster®.

Broderbund sued Unison, claiming its Print Shop computer program for Apple 
II computers was infringed by Unison's Printmaster program for IBM 
computers. (Don Williams was the programmer who eventually produced the 
first IBM version of The Print Shop® for Broderbund in 1985, and Berkley 
Softworks eventually wrote the Apple II version of PrintMaster®.)

Lead On, MacDuff

Unison's program development commenced during license negotiations between 
the two parties. During this time, the programmer (MacDuff Hudges) was 
instructed to make the IBM version a copy of Print Shop. They "were going to 
do a PC version for Broderbund under contract, but Broderbund didn't like 
the idea of paying much".

When negotiations broke down, the programmer was then instructed to take the 
present state of the program and enhance it to be a better product than 
Print Shop ("at the time nobody had ever won a look-and-feel lawsuit").

"We never saw their source code, nor would it have been very useful, 
since... we wrote PrintMaster® in C... Going into the lawsuit, our lawyers 
took the position that look-and-feel was invalid, and had lots of precedent 
to back it up."

Leave My Screens Alone

The Court took a broad view of copyright, holding that the copyright in a 
computer program extends beyond the literal program codes to the structures 
of the program, including the sequencing and arrangement of its audiovisual 
displays. Unison's Printmaster held to infringe Print Shop, and Broderbund 
won with the ruling that " `the overall structure, sequencing and 
arrangement of screens' in the user interface of a program are protected by 
copyright..."

Although this case included screen displays, later, in another case, Digital 
Comm. Assocs. v. Softklone Distrib. Corp., 659 F. Supp. 449 (N.D. Ga. 1987), 
the court found this to be erroneous.

Debate also continues, with one side saying that in these cases, as with 
Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Paperback Software Int'l, 740 F. Supp. 37 (D. Mass. 
1990), district courts made a similar analytical mistake in applying 
copyright law to the outputs of computer programs.

The argument against this being in some cases it may be difficult to 
classify a given interface as one or the other. Some output formats will 
contain sufficient original expression to merit protection.

What are the Fundamental Copyright issues for Computer Software?

Leave My Ideas Alone

Why Copyright is used beyond the protection of "purely artistic" artifacts 
in a computer program can be a puzzling topic. If we consider Copyright in 
music, for example, we would certainly not consider the topic of a song to 
be Copyrighted. The average person would usually consider only a literal 
"rip off" copy of a song to be a violation of the artist's Copyright.

But it is usually the idea and not the expression which is valuable for 
computer software, and that is the exact opposite of what copyright 
protects.

Copyright has necessarily been stretched out of its true ambit to include 
the 'structure, sequence and organisation' (Whelan v Jaslow) and the 'look 
and feel' (Broderbund Software Inc. v Unison World Inc.) of programs. This 
has happened because the use of copyright for 'literary work' as such does 
not enable software to be protected in the way that the computer industry 
would wish.

A Question of Balance

Copyright in software is extremely subjective. It is held by the industry 
that Copyright is supposed to balance effective protection for intellectual 
property rights in computer programs with the need for a free flow of 
information to encourage competition.

The use of copyright to protect computer software is the result of lobbying 
by companies to a perceived problem (in the mid 1970's) of home copying of 
computer games and counterfeiting of them in the Pacific Basin. Companies 
suffering from this 'piracy' were in the entertainment business and already 
using copyright to restrict the use of their goods, and decided to use 
copyright to protect computer software.

While the 'literary expression' of computer code comes under the Berne 
Convention, it is a rare program where the codes are the valuable aspect.

More fundamentally, basic copyright law requires that outputs of computer 
programs be evaluated solely on the basis of their own merits as expressive 
works of authorship and not any copyright in the program that produces them.

Who was the lawyer?

Claude M. Stern, later a partner in the Litigation and Intellectual Property 
Groups at Fenwick & West LLP, a law firm in Palo Alto, specializing in 
representing technology clients.

Mr. Stern served as lead trial counsel in a number of precedent setting 
cases, including Broderbund Software, Inc. v. Unison World, Inc., the 
pioneering case in the area of user-interface copyrightability.

© Copyright Bill Buckels 1991-2007
All Rights Reserved.
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