Update on Friday's post: The person I quoted who referred to "trademark" has corrected it to "copyright". It was just a typo. I kinda figured that, since the rest of the message was well-thought out.

If I had my way, when all was said and done, while I'd clean up the system and eliminate a lot of ambiguity, which might immediately seem to constrict the rights people currently seem to have (like, oh, say, public annotation), it would actually contract the 'rights' significantly. Kiss the DMCA goodbye, for instance. (Making the act of breaking copyright protection for the legal purpose of creating a backup copy?

In the Microsoft case, indeed in almost all of the digital monopoly cases, the dominant company will have to build its strategies around the contours of the original state monopoly we call intellectual property. Expand those rights, and the monopolies form quicker, grow larger.

The state is involved in creating [intellecutal-property based] monopolies, because there are choices to be made in designing property systems. Lots of them, in fact. One can agree with the idea that there should be intellectual property rights without answering the question "How far should those rights stretch? What conditions should Microsoft be able to attach to its software licenses? Restraints on competition? On criticism? To get the benefits of the state property grant, should it have to make source code available under a compulsory license?

Later I realized that you could already copyright code, which is to say, the law of the land has already recognized it as expression for a long time. (You can't copyright the workings of a machine, only pantent.) So I fear that, beyond sending a wake-up call to the lawyers and lawmakers that we have a problem, there's no real reason to believe that this alone will cause any reversal of software's unique position of being the only thing I know of that is currently restricted by both patents and copyrights.

Pessimistically speaking, I at first was thinking along the lines of you and Dave, but I now realize that such optimism may be a bit unfounded. As I posted on my 'blog, there has never really been any overlap between the patent system and the copyright system, and the two systems can't be mixed as they were set up with entirely different objectives and methods. So I had thought that by labeling "

No, trademarks are only identifying marks for companies and products; you can't protect code that way. You might put code in your trademark (like composing the letters "IBM" out of "Hello World" or something), but that still wouldn't prevent me using the code in a program, only in displaying the code in the form of that trademark.

My logical train of thought asks, "If code is protected speech, how can you patent it? Shouldn't it be more analogous to a trademark?"

However, I reconsidered my opinion on the recent ruling as code-as-expression, and I'm not as optimistic as I was. I posted this in the Userland DG, but I'll reproduce it here:

I'm feeling bad today and I'll soon be going home (where my Internet access is really bad) for the weekend, so no more updates.