EU Court Adviser Says Software Ideas Can't Be Copyrighted

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 29, 2011 @05:21AM from the perhaps-a-bot-but-not-robotic dept.

bhagwad writes "The EU continues to ooze common sense as a court insists that software functions themselves cannot be copyrighted. Drawing a box or moving cursor are examples. To quote: 'If it were accepted that a functionality of a computer program can be protected as such, that would amount to making it possible to monopolize ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development.'" Note that this is a "non-binding opinion by Yves Bot, an advocate-general at the Luxembourg-based EU Court of Justice," and that the court "will rule on the case next year."

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Re:Intellectual Property is killing everything by robot256 · 2011-11-29 06:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

I think both out-of-control bankers and out-of-control IP squabbles are symptoms of the current attitude in society, or at least among MBAs, that money can be created out of nothing. It's financial alchemy: it appears to work at first, but only because they are siphoning money away from somewhere else in the process, hence the recession. Solve the underlying attitude problem, and we solve all the symptoms at once. How to do that, I have no idea.