Re: Capital vs. others Debate

At 04:15 PM 4/6/97 PDT, Phil Pournelle wrote:

>GDWs Black Globe Generator is a direct rip off of the Langston Field in
Mote
>In God's Eye universe, along with a number of other things.  The only
reason
>they didn't sue is it wasn't worth the money and in the long run may
have
>actually helped sales.

I thought the reason they didn't sue was because you can't sue over an
idea
(well, actually you can sue over almost anything; you just won't win).
You
can patent an invention, you can trademark the name of an idea, you have
copyright over the explicit expression of an idea, but you do not have
copyright over the idea itself. If they trademarked the term "Langston
Field" and GDW had CALLED it a Langston Black Globe, or some such thing,
then it would have been actionable. If GDW called it a Langston Field
generator, they might have been sued over copyright infringement
(except, as
Phil pointed out, it isn't worth the money).

If you could sue over an idea, then Isaac Asimov could have sued
Rodenberry
for the idea of a sentient robot (Data). For that matter, Fritz Lang
could
have sued Asimov for robots in general, and the orignal "creator" of the
idea of an automatron (French? German? could find out if anyone REALLY
wanted to know) could have sued Lang.

Actually, it's not 100% true that you can't sue over an idea. There have
been cases where people have had an idea, someone stole the idea and
made it
fact, and the original inventor sued successfully. Some Canadian trivia:
Tim
Horton (hockey player, and founder of the Tim Hortons donut chain) came
up
with the idea for Tim Bits (called donut holes by other chains;
essentially
little donut chunks). Two years after he died, his partner introduced
them
as his own invention and tried to lock out Horton's widow from
collecting
any royalties on Tim Bit sales. She sued claiming her husband had the
idea
first; the partner lost. The difference between the two may seem
somewhat
vague (and it is). That's why there are so many lawyers in the world.

This message is off topic, but I think it's justified. First, it
reinforces
the fact that Jon can freely use ideas discussed here without fear of
copyright infringement. Second, there are a lot of misconceptions, with
regard to copyright, on the internet. This is one of my "buttons" and
I'm
just trying to clear up some of those misconceptions.

Allan Goodall:	agoodall@sympatico.ca 
"You'll want to hear about my new obsession.
 I'm riding high upon a deep depression. 
 I'm only happy when it rains."    - Garbage