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To: JC Jaros who wrote (1916)	12/12/1999 4:20:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) of 2615

In Canada we had a copyright process that was based upon prior invention. All you had to do is mail the song to yourself through Canada Post and it was copyrighted. You should then sing the song in public and mention to the audience that is is copyrighted material. Otherwise someone else could claim they thought up the whole thing by themselves and never heard your song! It almost got Morey Amsterdam off the hook when he was prosecuted for stealing Rum and Coca Cola from Tradewinds Music! It did not work though. Trust someone like B. Mulrooney to change all that in Canada. Now you have to copyright. Prior invention is not supposed to work. If it's not patented its anybody's idea according to some interpretations of Canadian law now. I don't know if this has been tested yet. I would like to go back to the days of "prior invention" as the only people who get benefits out of published patents in general are big companies who can steal them or defend them if they patent. A patent is only as good as the amount of money you have to sue with in ten countries. Gilbert Hyatt purported to prove in California court that when he was in collaboration with Intel, Intel learned of all the useful ways of making microprocessors in silicon that they had used until then. Intel had collaborated with Hyatt but collapsed the deal one year later and then made the 4004 within 8 months. Intel said in court that Hyatt's processor would not work as it was too large and would generate too much heat. Small wonder. It was a non-scaled prototype. I don't know about you but I think Intel was totally fair to exclude Hyatt from even a modest share of their profits. After all, no matter how much they learned from him, he could not prove that they could have earned more by never collaborating. He could not prove it of course, but it seems doubtful that they would have had the 4004 so soon after breaking the deal with him without looking at his obviously impractical design first, and for one solid year no less. Open source was developed with the idea in mind that the only way to protect Intellectual property was to make sure that corporate thieves could not profit from it. They could copy it but they could not profit by reselling it as their own no matter how much they changed it. This works well if the computer programs are very large and hard to change. Oepn Source makes more sense than copyrights, because most software developers, even with companies behind them, cannot afford to sue Microsoft or IBM. EC<:-}

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