Re: naive view of chips?

[Robert L Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>]

   From: Austin Franklin <austin@darkroom.com>
   Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2000 17:38:20 -0400

   [rlk:]
   Also (and I'm not a lawyer, but...):

   [Austin] Are you an engineer?

Yes.

   1) It's my understanding that copyright protects the expressive, not
      the functional, part of a work.  If the chip's a functional part of
      the system, then the expressing part of it (e. g. the firmware on
      the chip, or in the printer, the masks for the chip, or whatnot)
      could be subject to copyright, but the chip per se couldn't.

   [Austin] Well, where is the copyright infringement?  I still don't 
   understand what specifically you believe is copyrighted and is being 
   violated.  Say you eliminate the chip entirely from your replacement 
   cartridge...and disable the printer from checking the chip....what is it 
   that was copyrighted that you have violated?

I agree with you; perhaps you're confusing me with someone else.

Note however the recent curious case of the :Cue:Cat (a bar code
scanner), where Digital Convergence is giving them away and then
sending cease & desist letters to people who have figured out the
trivial encryption and have posted simple perl scripts for using it.
DC's real problem with it is presumed to be that they're basing their
revenue model on selling ads and demographic information; people using
the 'Cat without going through their site aren't giving them any
revenue.  Of course, C&D's only mean that they managed to pay some
lawyer some money to write them.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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