[sf-lug] need advice: GPL licensing question

[jim stockford]

    well, my intention was to present the concept that
an XML file might express an idea with the inference
that the XML file might therefore be copyrightable.

On Sep 13, 2007, at 4:24 PM, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting jim stockford (jim at well.com):
>
>> isn't the idea of copyright to protect an expression of an idea (not
>> the idea, the expression)?
>
> Correct.  So, the idea of a novel where the first-person narrator
> is accused of murder but you (the reader) only gradually realise he
> never told you he didn't do it cannot qualify for copyright -- and
> you're perfectly free to write such a novel.  However, the moment Scott
> Turow wrote _Presumed Innocent_, his particular _expression_ of that
> idea became Copyright (C) 1987, Scott Turow.
>
> If you retype a 50-page passage of _Presumed Innocent_ and attempt to
> offer it to others as your own work, claiming you'd borrowed only the
> _idea_ from Turow, you would lose.
>
> Turow owns a synthetic, limited property right over some uses of the
> stream of words in question, his expression of the idea.
>
>> Can an XML file or possibly a database express an idea (e.g. XML file
>> that describes a graphic image)?
>
> Turow's novel _also_ expresses an idea.
>
> That is, you're missing the point.  Both Turow's stream of words and a
> particular XML scheme that Catherine might create ("put in fixed form")
> embodies an _expression_ of an idea.
>
> Expressions, within the eight areas of human endeavour covered by the
> Copyright Act, provided they are substantive[1] and have creative
> (i.e., expressive) content, become automatically copyrighted at the
> instant their authors put them into "fixed form".
>
> If you're trying to argue that an XML file is "only an idea" because 
> you
> think it's somehow too intangible to be a creative expression, I think
> no judge is likely to agree with you, any more than they would agree
> that -- oh -- Oracle RDBMS is "only an idea".
>
>
> [1] That is, something like a five-line shell script probably wouldn't
> be rule to be substantive enough to have a copyright title at all, no
> matter what its author might claim to the contrary.
>
>
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