Copyright Community

The importance of expert knowledge has changed. It has partly grown, but partly diminished. For some decades the traditional need of lawyers, who really understand the “system” of Copyright law, has waned. Here we do not indicate the luckily obsolete German tradition of deriving uncertain meanings of legal terms from uncertain meanings of other terms.

All European Copyright legislation today is built on some definite keystones, like e.g. “making copies” and “disseminating”. Both defy all reason. In computers, say some duplicating the bitstrings is “copying”, but some is not. The writer of these lines is using a standard keyboard, which means duplicating the coded signal in USB between the keys and the computer. This is not “copying”.

The mastery of these teachings used to be a good sign of expertise. It no longer seems to be so.

The coming of the Internet was something extraordinary and unexpected. However, it seems evident that the great change is now imminent or already begun. It is at present described as the Industrial Internet or Internet of Things – and it is very much the same thing as advanced robotics, already now familiar at least from modern cars with their numerous safety features that actually take over driving the vehicle in critical situations.

When there actually are now available tens of billions “IP-addresses”, the possibilities of organizing very complicated processes according to various features, we are looking ahead of “customized massproduction”, e.g. preparing medicines in pharmacies for the specified needs of patients.

This phenomenon really has very much to do with copyright, although this “Internet 4.0” mostly is presented as a new problem for Law of Patents.

Copyright was seen as things pertaining to literature, music and arts. It is politely forgotten that even the German Copyright Act 1871 was needed most by the German wholesale that was soon very strong even in furnishing British bookstores with British books.

Copyright disputes on computer programs have not been very common. The reasons are obvious. In face of change databases and Database Law seem to be more important than copyright. Console games typically consist of very advanced graphics protected by copyright, idea being the rules of the game and hence not protected by copyright, and databases.

The last mentioned contain most of “strategies” of winning games. You could compare this with programming lots of so called master games in your chess playing program.

In industrial internet everything will be of question of arranging pieces of knowledge and extracting them really soon. This is what “flying by wire” already means in aviation. Except, there will be no need of wires.

Share: