[WikiEN-l] Grandmother copyrighted anonymous works

Tue Sep 12 05:07:43 UTC 2006

Jason Potkanski wrote:

>Copyright in the US seems rather clear. Copyright is designed to
>protect ideas and to a limited extent the expression of those ideas.
>
That's not correct.  It protects the expression but not the ideas at 
all.  (In some cases the idea may be protected by patents.)  When the 
information becomes so intertwined with the expression that the two 
cannot be separated it can render the expression uncopyrightable.  This 
is the merger principle. It was the basis for Lexmark's court loss to 
Static Control Corp., when it claimed that copying a handshake program 
was a copyvio.

Ec