peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (08/24/83)
Followers of the discussion on legal protection of software will be interested in an up-to-date article on the matter in the August 1983 issue of IEEE Computer (publ. by the IEEE Computer Society). The article, by a lawyer with a firm that has done a lot of work in the area, says, among other things, that software IS patentable, that copyright doesn't provide much protection, trade secret treatment doesn't either, and that trademarks should have more attention paid to them. It also answers a lot of questions asked in this group (e.g. reverse-engineering a program is indeed fine, but the screen layout may be copyrighted. I believe Intel also copyrighted the 8086 instruction set mnemonics, but I'm not sure if it got them anywhere). p. rowley, U. Toronto utzoo!utcsrgv!peterr