Chapter 4. Copyright
The movie Antitrust came out at the height of the dot-com boom. Antitrust was Hollywood’s take on the geek chic of the late 1990s: the story of a few heroic open source hackers taking on an evil, grasping corporation situated in the Pacific Northwest.
Predictably, it was awful.
Buried among all the things that this movie got wrong, though, was one thing it got right: early in the movie, the protagonist is seen wearing a t-shirt that labels him a “code poet.” In one phrase, they captured why software is subject to copyright law—because it is a form of personal expression, not just a means of accomplishing some function.
Understanding the subtle distinctions inherent in that statement is essential to understanding the storms of controversy that inevitably arise around copyright issues.
Copyright in Context
Copyright is probably the most difficult of the four major branches of intellectual property law. Although patent documents (and some aspects of patent practice) are more complex and intricate than the copyright equivalents, the underlying mechanics of the patent system are relatively simple.
Patents can be seen as a straightforward exchange: describe your invention to society and in return receive exclusive control over the use of the invention. After a while, the period of exclusive control ends and everybody receives the benefit of your inventive effort.
Copyright is superficially similar but fundamentally different. Like patent law, copyright is part of the grand ...