| It did get me thinking about something here. The deal with patents is that you make the way your invention works public knowledge. You document the principle and in exchange you get a limited-time monopoly on its implementation. An alternative for this is a trade secret. As long as you guard the secret, you can remain the only one profiting off it. Of course, some things are impractical to keep secret. It's easier to keep a method of making a fizzy drink under wraps than how the gears are laid out in the gadget you sell. You also can't really make the contents of a book a secret. Anyone can just look at their copy, arrange words in the same order as you did and sell your book. It also makes no sense to patent the words. The contents are already inherently public knowledge to a certain extent and now people could just buy the book from a patent office. And the clerks don't like filing novel-length applications. Music is not quite as easy to make a 1-to-1 copy of, especially before wide adoption of sound recording technology, but a lot of people can carry a tune well enough to plagiarize one. And sometimes you get a child prodigy Mozart illegally transcribing Miserere. Since it has been deemed desirable [if not unanimously] that writers and artists also have a period of monopoly rights over their work, copyright needs to work differently from patents. Software has interesting properties. Unlike a book, you can distribute a program but keep its "recipe" a secret. We'll disregard people who are capable of working with compiled binaries; consider them modern-day transcribers of Miserere. Proprietary code is typically guarded just as any trade secret would be. Perhaps software should have been covered by patents instead of copyright from the beginning. After the patent expires, the algorithm would be unencumbered and public knowledge. But that's not the world we live in. Software is considered to be like a book, not like a pocket watch. You could mail me a printout of the entire Windows 11 source and there's hardly anything I could ever legally do with it. I could change it for my own amusement I guess, like I can take a red pen and change all the names in my copy of Postmodernism for beginners. |