Robodini Q&A

[Gusev]

I always thought ideas had to be patented to be protected, not copyrighted. Is that right or wrong? Does anyone know?

I have 7 U.S. patents, 1 European patent, and a couple of works copyrighted in the U.S. Let me answer this one.

Copyrights protect creative works. In particular, court precedents established that software (computer programs) can be copyright-protected in the U.S. In contrast to that, the U.S. does not support the "sweat of brow" doctrine, so telephone directories are not copyright-protected there: They are not considered creative works.

Patents protect inventions. An invention is not just an idea, it has to have an embodiment and commercial application. A novel step not obvious to those familiar with the prior art and experienced in the field has to be involved: An invention has to be both new and non-trivial.

Ideas are NOT protected by law. For instance, it is legal for a politician to "steal his opponents thunder" and advocate an idea first proposed by someone else without the author's permission. However, the ACM Code of Ethics http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics states "Computing professionals are obligated to protect the integrity of intellectual property. Specifically, one must not take credit for other's ideas or work, even in cases where the work has not been explicitly protected by copyright, patent, etc." Such a violation of professional ethics by an ACM member can be punished: "Adherence of professionals to a code of ethics is largely a voluntary matter. However, if a member does not follow this code by engaging in gross misconduct, membership in ACM may be terminated." I am unaware of such precedents, though.

[Gusev]

I have the unrealistic expectation that engine authors are going to be HONEST about the origins of their engine, too.

I encourage everyone interested to read about a relevant U.S. case, Computer Associates v. Altai Inc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_A ... Altai_Inc.. Here's a small quote to make all of you interested: In response, Altai ordered a clean room rewrite of the copied portions of the code to be performed by eight programmers who had no knowledge or involvement with the previous OSCAR code. This new program was released as OSCAR 3.5.

[Don]

I always thought ideas had to be patented to be protected, not copyrighted. Is that right or wrong? Does anyone know?

I have 7 U.S. patents, 1 European patent, and a couple of works copyrighted in the U.S. Let me answer this one.

Copyrights protect creative works. In particular, court precedents established that software (computer programs) can be copyright-protected in the U.S. In contrast to that, the U.S. does not support the "sweat of brow" doctrine, so telephone directories are not copyright-protected there: They are not considered creative works.

Patents protect inventions. An invention is not just an idea, it has to have an embodiment and commercial application. A novel step not obvious to those familiar with the prior art and experienced in the field has to be involved: An invention has to be both new and non-trivial.

Ideas are NOT protected by law. For instance, it is legal for a politician to "steal his opponents thunder" and advocate an idea first proposed by someone else without the author's permission. However, the ACM Code of Ethics http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics states "Computing professionals are obligated to protect the integrity of intellectual property. Specifically, one must not take credit for other's ideas or work, even in cases where the work has not been explicitly protected by copyright, patent, etc." Such a violation of professional ethics by an ACM member can be punished: "Adherence of professionals to a code of ethics is largely a voluntary matter. However, if a member does not follow this code by engaging in gross misconduct, membership in ACM may be terminated." I am unaware of such precedents, though.

My name is also on a patent and even though it's based on software, the patent is on the concept that the software realizes. I am under NDA to talk about what it is specifically. A few years after I left Akamai they requested that I sign over my rights to the patent as the idea was developed in cooperation with our team and for the company which I happily did.

With computer chess ideas I have a difficult time believing that any of them rise to the level of being both "new" and "non-trivial" as an idea or implementation. Let's take one example. Singular extensions. As far as I know this idea originated and was published by the Deep Blue team. However, the form of it that we use today is different, actually far simpler. But the principle behind it is exactly the same. Now if you could patent that based on the idea that it has something a little different and new, I could come up with many variations of it that could be patented.

There is nothing really new in computer chess - the basic principles have been around a long time ago and mostly we have seen gradual improvements and refinements, so I would not even know where to draw the line. Reductions have been around for decades so even LMR is not new, but what is new about LMR is a much more systematic approach to it. There are several things that stand out as fairly innovative in computer chess, things you could actually put some faith in saying these are really new ideas. None of these in the last 5 years though.

Nobody does LMR exactly the same, nobody does extension the same. If Komodo does extensions better than anyone else can I patent that? I don't think so. There are a lot of little things in Komodo that I do not believe anyone else does but they boil down to variations of more general concepts. Where do you draw the line?

[Gusev]

If Komodo does extensions better than anyone else can I patent that? I don't think so. There are a lot of little things in Komodo that I do not believe anyone else does but they boil down to variations of more general concepts. Where do you draw the line?

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply! What may matter is (a) where a patent examiner draws the line as to what's patentable, then (b) where the court draws the line as to whether an issued patent is enforcible (for example, a court might find that not everything was disclosed at the time of patenting that should have been disclosed, or it might find that the patented "invention" is, in fact, obvious to those knowledgeable in the art, etc.), and (c) if someone violated your patent, can you prove the fact of violation? The inventions such that a patent violation would be difficult to prove should not be patented. They should remain trade secrets. I forgot to mention it, but trade secrets are also protected, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret. This may be relevant here.

[Gusev]

So is it allowed if I get public domain code published by unknown people, add afew things, and re-publish the whole as GPL under my name?

While it may or may not be unethical, it's definitely legal. Indeed, public domain code can even be legally used in a closed-source commercial product, so, of course, it can be legally included in an open-source product released under the GPL license. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain clarifies, public domain works can be freely used for derivative works without permission.

[velmarin]

So is it allowed if I get public domain code published by unknown people, add afew things, and re-publish the whole as GPL under my name?

While it may or may not be unethical, it's definitely legal. Indeed, public domain code can even be legally used in a closed-source commercial product, so, of course, it can be legally included in an open-source product released under the GPL license. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain clarifies, public domain works can be freely used for derivative works without permission.

Sure, sure, even trade with it. Which is not very ethical, but legal.

But the GPL never annul the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

[Gusev]

The Supreme Court has endowed corporations with "personhood" so it's natural to ask, "if a corporation is a person, what kind of person is it?"

Don, I wholeheartedly agree with you that corporations are NOT people! (For those who didn't pay attention to legal developments in the U.S.: Don made a reference to Citizens United v. FEC, a famous case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_U ... Commission.)

[Don]

The Supreme Court has endowed corporations with "personhood" so it's natural to ask, "if a corporation is a person, what kind of person is it?"

Don, I wholeheartedly agree with you that corporations are NOT people! (For those who didn't pay attention to legal developments in the U.S.: Don made a reference to Citizens United v. FEC, a famous case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_U ... Commission.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

In 1819 the courts basically granted corporations most of the same rights as an individual including the rights provided by the 14th amendment.

This was actually a wonderful thing for corporations and has allowed them to gain unprecedented power.

One of Mitt Romney's alleged "gaffs" was saying "corporations are people" and he was probably referring to this.

Corporations are people until you ask them to actually take responsibility for their actions, then they are just companies.

[mcostalba]

I am afraid that any future update of Criitter will be marked with a black flag....

Critter will never be the same regards,
Dr.D

This is just a rhetoric cheap shot. You should have a better clue of from where the first 5 top engines come from. All of them, and I mean all of them, have reached top ELO using ideas RE from somewhere, or directly or indirectly, through an open source built with heavy use of RE. And the current top engine, that in this case is the offended part, even takes the crown and is the king of the "helped by RE" somewhere in his genealogy tree. Critter is one of the best engines and always will be, even better in the future.

Regarding the spread of the Robodini virus, have you been infected (have you downloaded Robodini) ? In this case you could "sanitize" yourself deleting it from your hard disk.

[bob]

In the US as well. In that you simply can't patent software any longer. This changed at least 30 years ago. The only real protection here is copyright, which can extend to hardware since EEPROMS can be copied, which is copying a binary, which is copyrighted.

On what planet are you living? Software patents are very much alive.
The state of the art video codec H264 is protected by 1000s of patents.

http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc ... c-att1.pdf

Just one obvious example.

I live in the US, where patent law does NOT explicitly cover computer software. There are dozens of examples of case law where software patents were thrown out, because the US congress did not consider software (since it didn't exist when patent laws were written.)

What part of the world are YOU from? Copyrights on computer software, on the other hand, are alive, well, and have been enforced many times.