Free?

[Chante]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:02:03 -0400, Chante <udontspamme at never.will.u>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote
>>>
>>> compiled software
>>
>> (you meant, "source code")
>
> OK, let's try this again.
>
> Source code is copyrightable.  Compiled code *IS ALSO* copyrighted
> due to it being a direct translation of the source code that is
> copyrighted.  Any way you take source code and make some other form
> of media-based data out of it is copyrighted.  We can keep going
> around in this circle if you wish.
> This might help:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright

Yes, it did. See, I did not know this:

"copyright for computer programs prohibits not only literal copying, but 
also copying of "nonliteral elements", such as program structure and 
design."

When people (and you, not that you're not a people, hehe) would say 
"copyright", my mind would think "literal text" (like a book's text). 
While that has given me a much greater understanding that copyright does 
afford more protection than I thought, it's still not enough for the most 
important things, I think: the proprietary technologies upon which the 
software is built. It would seem that the technologies are free game to 
be used by anyone cognizant of them, under copyright, as long as they use 
them in a different way, say in a program with completely different 
functionality but still using the technology. For instance, pretend that 
Unicode had not yet been created and that instead, a software company 
released a word processing program based upon UnicodeTM, a proprietary 
technology. Copyright would allow all to use UnicodeTM in programs that 
were not word processors. Patent would disallow this and the company 
could then capitalize on UnicodeTM in other products.