From help-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Jun 17 06:00:06 1999 Subject: Re: Matlab File Format+some deliberations From: Daniel Heiserer To: "help-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu" Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 12:59:31 +0200 OK. As far as I have seen and see it every day again this is NOT a well defined area. One reason is, or might be that most laws (the real ones, done by the fathers of our constitutions, which I pay all respect to. I mean not the laws done by todays paperpushers.) were created in the non-digital area. In that time you could copy something and it wasn't the same. Like a painting or whatever. In todays time even if you don't copy something just look at something e.g. matlab and you try to make something similar it could end up whith the same bits. (For many things there are very exposed optima) If you see it *VERY* strict even using a language similar to matlab's one, would mean you reverse engineer the program. (The language itself could be given out by the "diary" command, so it is created by the programm and mustn't be coded for something else accroding to that thinking). Assume a program lets say, which is *MINE* dumps out all ascii characters from \000-\177. Assume I put a license on that. That would mean *NOBODY* is allowed to use any character any more. Even better.... I say yes and no, 0 and 1 and the whole digital world is *COPYRIGHTED* by me. *REMEMBER* a copyright could say *EVEN* *PARTS* of it ...... mustn't be reused, or reverse engineered. RESULT: I have enough to do, I needn't spend my time on things, which could bring me into trouble. *BUT* this ideas we collected here will become *VERY* interesting for *ALL* of us and for whole mankind. Depending how law moves. I spoke of a digital area. digital/non-digital are two sides of one coin. Lets have a look on the non-digital area: Everything consists of atoms. This is already a discretization. Which could mean that if I *COPYRIGHT* which contains the elements 1-110 nobody in the world would be allowed to produce/copyright anything again, because that would require at least one of *MINE* atoms. And again remember *AS WHOLE OR AS IN PARTS*. Even the air to breathe could be forbidden. There were so many stupid juristical decisions in the last years in the new areas like computer sciences, genetic engineering (can you imagine that law allows *SOMEBODY* who picks up a hair of you is allowed to patent *YOUR* DNA. Having a clever(or lets say better expensive) lawyer could leed to the restriction that *YOU* are not allowed to reproduce yourself. hahahaha ) and so on that I sometimes have the feeling that our time-counter will not step to 2000 but to 1984. These are not very smart consideratins, though they also could be done by a smart (better said well paid) lawyer. The *ONLY* reason, why humanity came out of stone throwing age is because they *LEARNED* from each other by watching and reusing. *REVERSE ENGINEERING* *IS* what the *MAN* differs from () but most of everything else on earth. The only juristically (forgive me) person who *IS* allowed to put a copyright concerning *REVERSE ENGINEERING* on anything, did it. And *HE* put it under something similar to *GPL*. G O D! But it seems to me that in todays world people believe more in lawyers or lets say the money, with which they can buy them *ALL* though there is no lawyer left for the *SMALL* man. PS: I am neihter left-winged nor right-winged. I just want the air to breathe which I am convinced I have the right to. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. To ensure that development continues, see www.che.wisc.edu/octave/giftform.html Instructions for unsubscribing: www.che.wisc.edu/octave/archive.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------