Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

drew Roberts said:
> On Friday 18 March 2005 05:14 pm, Greg London wrote:
>> drew Roberts said:
>> Copyright covers the expression,
>> not the implementation.
>> You can enforce copyright on your expression
>> whether it is written in ink on paper,
>> oil on canvas, a CD ROM, or bits in a ROM.
>
> Again, I am ignorant. These are not actual bits though, are they? Aren't 
> they
> gates, resistors, diodes, etc? Are ROMs made from masks?


Yes, but a bit in a ROM can be copyrighted for
what it REPRESENTS, not what it is.

If 1001010101010001010101 REPRESENTS
"to be or not to be", then you can copyright it.

If the physical combination of gates, resistors,
and diodes represent "to be or not to be",
then its a copy/derivative of the work.

The GPL violation site you linked to sounded like
the violation was from putting GPL code into ROM,
and ROM still expresses the code.

Now switch over to verilog code to describe
some functionality in hardware.

wire output;
assign output = A & B | (C ^ D);

As long as you are only representing that expression,
copyright applies to the work.

Someone could express that same functionality differently
and not be infringing the copyright of the original
because copyright does not protect functionality.

wire acknowledge = Val & Address | (Interrupt ^ Mask);

You would have to develop your code without looking
at the other person's code to claim it's wholly
your own expression, but copyright will allow
different works to express the same functionality.

Now, when you take an expression like the one above
which expresses how to calculate the acknowledge
output signal, and actually IMPLEMENT that functionality,
then it is no longer EXPRESSING the functionality,
it is DOING it.

If someone wrote a book on how to build a mechanical
clock from balsa wood, then if a customer buys that
book, and builds that clock, copyright does not apply
to the clock, even though they used the instructions
in the book, word-for-word, step-by-step, to build
the clock.

The clock isn't an expression anymore, it IS the functionaly
described in the book.

The clock is NOT a derivative copyright work of the book.

Which means I could buy the book from the author
and start manufacturing clocks without paying the
author a single cent, without getting their permission.

The only way the author could prevent me from
manufacturing and selling clocks that use his
design is if his design was sufficiently new
and unique and functionally different from any
previous clock design to qualify for patent protection.


>> Thinking about it now, I just realized that
>> you cannot copyright a recipe for cake.
>
> You may not be able to copyright a recipe for cake, that would be good and 
> if
> so, is good to know, ... but I just went and checked three cookbooks and 
> they
> all have copyright pages. So, if the recipes cannot be copyrighted, what
> exactly is copyrighted in these books?

Usually a cookbook has a recipe, a picture of the
finished dish, and a paragraph or two that talks
about how the dish tastes, who they got the
recipe from, etc. The pictures and the non-recipe
paragraphs are copyrighted.