Patent Attorney's Counsel ... We Be FINE

[garfield at pilgrimhouse.com]

On Thu, 25 Jun 1998 18:02:38 -0700, goflo at pacbell.net wrote:

>Quite so. You are talking about patent law.
>The list activities I refer to are the copying and disassembly of roms 
>and such. HR2281 as presently constituted contains the potential to
>abridge
>such activities by diminishing the scope of "Fair Use", and by making it 
>illegal to "circumvent" a code-protection scheme, among other things.
>Copyright law, as you say. 
>You seem knowledgable about this stuff, Gar. What's the deal?

Yeah, well EVERY TIME you boot up WinNinetyATE, you know who to thank
for that. Basically what Diamond Bill and the others wanna do is, say,
"OH, you can't look, you can't touch, you can ONLY 'use.' ".

IF that goes thru, you and everyone else on the planet will RUE the day,
cuz it means the start of MUCH more aggressive abridgements of 1st
Amendment rights in ALL sectors. Think about it. YOU can no longer take
apart an assembly of CAR parts to understand how they work, IF there's
been a concerted effort on the part of the MFG to keep you from same.
Cute, eh? And IF you try to understand anything protected by these
methods, YOU are violating the protectee's "property rights". NEVER will
this set of laws pass in MY country. GOD forbid!!

Kinda like patenting shoe-lace tying and maybe even "breathing". After
all, BOTH are "techniques". And you bloody well better not try to
"reverse engineer" breathing!!

Gar