Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 21:22:05 04/30/02
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On May 01, 2002 at 00:01:42, allan johnson wrote: > Russell I found your response logical and persuasive.When I first read Jeroen's > message I sympathised with him a great deal but after reading your rejoinder > I've been convinced that he really shouldn't expect to own chess openings. > Al It's a difficult area. An opening book is basically a set of "instructions" just like an executable program is. An executable program is really just a series of numbers that act as instructions. I think that it requires a higher level of understanding to infer copyright on a series of numbers. It is not the series of numbers themselves that are copyrighted, but the higher level of the concept of an "instruction" that is copyrighted. For example, you could take a program that is copyrighted, and in 100 years when the hardware we use today doesn't even exist, that set of instructions probably won't even work. So at that point those series of numbers aren't even useful, but the instructions are still the author's intellectual property. But then you can get into the debate over whether the instructions are even the author's creation. The author used a compiler that (in most cases) will create faster code than if the author had written the binary instructions himself. Most people probably don't have enough knowledge to write code that is as efficient as what a compiler produces at the ASM level. I could probably write a chess program in ASM (although I'd hate doing it), but it would probably be drastically slower than what a compiler produces. So should the people who wrote the compiler have any claim to the set of instructions? As I said, it's a tricky area. I just think that trying to win this argument is silly. It's something that you simply can't enforce, and even if you could, it's still up for debate what is "right" and what is "wrong". Some people believe certain things are right and wrong based on religious beliefs. The law of our governments often allows for things that religion considers wrong. Abortion for example, or looking at pornographic material. Government allows those things, but in a religious context they would be considered wrong. If a tournament was held in a country that did not recognize copyright laws, what then? Russell
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