Sean Breheny wrote:

> I was under the impression that the whole idea behind patents was to
> encourage relatively quick public release of new technologies by using
> the incentive of a government guaranteed temporary monopoly. Since
> copyrights last at least for the life of the author (sometimes passed on
> to their estate, I think), I would think that there is a very good
> reason why governments would not want people to be able to copyright
> anything which could restrict the use of a technology (i.e., its OK to
> prevent someone else from ever using a particular
> software/textual/graphic implementation, but one would not want that to
> be true of an algorithm, circuit design concept, or even a particular
> circuit implementation if it is the only known way to do something)

Good point. That would basically boil down to "the more potentially useful
something is considered, the less deep is copyright protection". The play
as derived work of a published book is then only protected because it's not
seen as very useful. 

Gerhard

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