Software Piracy???

Hey,

Just an interesting concept i thought about the other day.

With (most) software, there is a copyright companies place on the content of the CD, floppy disk etc. However what is actually on the CD? Isn't it compiled code? Binary numbers? 1's and 0's? So, the data on the CD is actually a number like "0100101011010101001011001..... etc". If the data is just a concatination of other numbers, it makes one long number, right? So really, a company is paintenting (sorry about the spelling) a number. So in realitity it is like someone trying to copyright "pi" (3.1415...). If that was the case, everyone that uses "pi" would have to pay a fee and agree to the terms and conditions of using "pi". It is just rediculous the concept of copyrighting a number, however in reality of the software world it is just that.

I thought this was an interesting concept, what do you think? (feel free to expand on this subject)

Thanks,

Hmm, pi is a number which you could say occurs naturally, i.e. it is not really man-made. No-one can own pi or copyright it. With software, although in its raw form it is one long number (100110110 etc.) this 'number' has only been constructed through the hard work of programmers and designers, who should be able to copyright their work so nobody else can copy it and profit from it. It is a number, but it is an incredibly long number: for a full 650mb CD, it would be a number with 5200000000 digits (I think).
It is an interesting concept, but the validity of the issue is debatable.

Well, I am not sure that a number, in and of itself can be copyrighted or patented. I believe that the number in conjunction with some other work could be copyrighted as long as it was part of a greater whole.
Of course, I could be way off base.

very interesting concept. I dig it a lot. However:

Books can also be copyrightd (not sure bout spellin, sorry). Books contain letters arranged in a specific order. So by this theory, I could write a book containing: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ copyright it, then charge everyone who uses the alphabet to teach or read?

lol, that would kick azz

cross that’s the answer!

if you wrote a book containing nothing but the alphabet had it copy written, then no one else could write a book in exactly the same way. Variations could be made like the alphabet illustrated (gory) but what you've done with those letters belongs to you.

So in answer to the original post:

Copyrights on software are like copyrights on books in that you could publish a certain combination of number and only you could publish that number combination, not that you own the numbers but you have sole rights to publish what you've done with them.

not a very neighborly thing copyrights, are they?

That is like saying that if I copyright all possible musical notes, everyone would have to pay me a royalty if they want to write music. Of course, this is not the case. As I recall when I was getting some music copyrighted, the lawyers would check to see if there were any musical phrases or some other type of quantifiable similarity to someone else’s work.

I've started writing my book, it will be done shortly :)

Interesting discussion. My take on it is, and I might be repeating what's already been said, that the code is not copyrightable. The content on the disk is. In other words, the actual software can be copyrighted as intellectual property. It's sort of like writing a webpage, using HTML. You can't copyright HTML. What you copyright is the content of the page, the words, graphics, and so on.

That's a pretty simplified explanation, and the code you're talking about and a webpage built on HTML is a lot different. This is one of the better questions I've seen here. I'd really be interested to see what others have to say.

That is a very interesting point Chuck56! However, the code is machine code, so the code and the information itself is tied in with one antoher so they are really copyrighting the code and the information. This is difficuit, may settle a court case with this idea... ;)

if the copyright is only on the combination of the numbers, the you could just change one numer and say that it is ur own programm?? don't think so... so.... the copyright isn't onley in the combination of the numbers... (sorry for my badddd englisch :S)

Actually, unless I'm talking out of my hat, you'd have to make major changes in the code. To use another similarity: Two writers each write a novel about a true murder. Parts of it will be the similar, the murder, how it happened, and the general information. Maybe a few of the sentences will even be the same. But the books themselves will be so different that neither author would be able to claim copyright infringement.

The entire software code would have to be rewritten, in other words.

All of these are good points,but I think we're all forgetting the "clean room" approach to reverse engineering.For those that have never heard of it,it was made famous by Pheonix to functionally duplicate IBM BIOSes.To do this they hired two teams of engineers,the second team consisted of people who had never seen or studied an IBM BIOS(or at least were willing to testify to that in court).The first team studied the BIOS and wrote a complete description as possible of what the BIOS did.Then finally,the second team read the description and made a BIOS from scratch that did the exact same thing as the IBM BIOS.The technique survived all legal attacks,because you can't intentionally duplicate something you have absolutely no knowledge of.Although none of this was a direct quote,I got the info from Upgrading and Repairing PC's 10th edition.How I remembered that was in there is beyond me,as it's been at least 2 years since I've read it.