phik

Back in the heady days when Cluster File Systems was not a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation, a near-constant thorn in my side were people who did not come anywhere close to understanding the protections (not) provided by copyright.

One partner got so worked up that I think they’d have actually sued if we weren’t so valuable to them, essentially because we reimplemented one of their APIs (and naturally, they wanted to claim copyright on our code). That they managed to find lawyers willing to litigate that claim was, I thought, impressive enough to let it go forward, but even a frivolous lawsuit costs so much in the United States that I never could have. In the end they decided it was not worth it.

Reading Wendy Seltzer’s “No Copyright for Games” today took me back to those days. Not exactly the same issues, but I feel for the Scrabulous guys.