Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 12/87 - checked

December 1987

Really, I AM trying to be very serious about this, but I am having great difficulty. I have been looking at the headline of a press release that made its way into the PCW offices earlier this year. It came my way because Lord Editor Cohen though it might make an interesting subject for discussion. Well, it probably would if only I could get my purient little mind past that headline.

The item in question reads as follows: LEVIS...DISPOSABLE NAPPIES..... DUREX...BRITISH LEYLAND EXHAUST PIPES....DALLAS.

It then asks the immortal question, `what have all these products got in common?'. Now, I am quite prepared to put up £5 for the wittiest story linking all these together (in a way that is printable) because the possibilities must be endless. I can see all sorts of links between them, especially if you only take a couple at a time. Some are obvious, though I am having a little difficulty in linking exhaust pipes with anything.

But this press release was not sent out just to promote a trick question: the question is real enough, and there is in fact a real answer. It is that their intellectual property rights are jealously guarded.

Now, I am once again back in the land of great difficulty, trying to square the concept of intellectual property rights with a British Leyland exhaust pipe. It takes a bit of effort to think of a bit of bent tin as `intellectual property'.

I reach total incredulity when it comes to `Dallas': as I have never noticed any intellect in the few episodes of this programme I have witnessed, I fail to see how it can be fairly claimed as property by anyone. I'm just glad that no-one tries to pin responsibility for it on me.

There is, I suppose, just a little bit of me that wouldn't mind, just once in a while, if someone pinned some of the money `Dallas' makes on to me. I suppose that I might feel the same about an exhaust pipe, had I designed it. Disposable nappies would be a sure-fire winner, I would guess, on the old northern principle that, `where there's muck there's brass'. You could pin some of that on me (the brass, not the muck) any day you wanted.

And that, of course, is what intellectual property is all about. If you have a good idea, then have you the right to exploit it. More to the point, has anyone else the right to copy it and set up in competition against you? The obvious answer is `no', but with the human race being the generally unscrupulous bunch of self-interested thieves it is, we all know damned well that someone (not us, naturally) will copy, steal or otherwise `appropriate' an idea or design given half a chance.

The press release came from a company called WessyngTech, which specialises in helping companies protect their intellectual property. They are, it says, real whizzos at copyright, trade marks, trade secrets and patents, and I'm sure they're right. They also claim to be pretty nifty at an important bit of modern business - making money out of intellectual property by negotiating licence agreements for it with other companies. With the computer industry still relatively young, and the PC business a veritable babe-in-arms, it is understandable that many of the people in it will not necessarily understand the full intricacies of the law. This is especially so when the law, when related to computer-oriented intellectual property, is so often demonstrably an ass.

More often than not, however, it is the people involved in a company or project who are the asses. WessyngTech quotes a story about one UK software house which did not realise that it should register copyright to its product in the USA before taking on an agent to sell it there. Not only did the agent start selling the product itself, it also registered the copyright for itself. This meant that when the authors tried to sell their own product in the US market they found themselves taken to court by their `agent' for `pirating' their own product. Needless to say, the agent won the court case. This is what we call `doing business'.

Yes, I know that I am an idealist for thinking this, but it would be nice to think that we could go through a life based on honourable relationships with other individuals. But the human race, if ever faced with the straight choice between `honour' and making a fast buck, will choose the latter almost to a man (I'm not half so sure about the women) and they won't care too much who gets in the way or gets hurt.

It has to be said that, due to the vagaries of copyright law, such problems are likely to affect software much more than hardware. It is much easier to prove a rip-off when there is something physical to examine.

So, if you have slaved away in your spare time creating your software masterwork, tread very carefully. There are a million sharks out there, waiting to bite your hand off, or anything else that comes within reach.

One particular problem with software is actually proving the program is yours once you have sweated all that blood. As the aforementioned software house found, registration is some measure of defence. That is why the new National Software Register is worth a mention.

This organisation is offering a storage and registration service for new applications software that should give a fair amount of clout in any copyright case. There has to be some doubts, however, whether this gets over the grey area of computer copyright law, where someone uses just sufficient new coding to try on the claim that their product is different or new.

Certainly there is a fee attached to the NSR service, though it could help to reduce some of the legal costs that might be faced in any copyright case. If you are looking for an alternative, however, there is one but it is not particularly popular with the majority of people. For now, it only applies to those computer users with machines that run cassette tapes, but maybe it could be extended.

This alternative is the imposition of a 10 percent levy on blank cassettes that is planned as part of a new Copyright and Intellectual Property Bill. This is primarily aimed at those who copy music and does have its dubious aspects. For example, while I can see a reason for a levy where I might copy an album for a friend, depriving the artist of due royalties, it is perhaps a bit hard where I copy it for playing in the car.

By and large, however, I am in favour of this approach and feel it could perhaps be applied to blank disks as well. If you don't like it then make certain you are not a pirate, even in the smallest sense, and stop anyone you know being one. Otherwise, we must assume that everyone is guilty and pay the fine accordingly.

Remember, next time it could be your new software product that is being ripped off.

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