RE: Is your documentation copyrighted?

[Win Day <winday -at- home -dot- com>]

At 02:21 PM 1/25/00 -0700, Brent L Jones wrote:

<SNIP>

>I've never worked for a company that registered its copyrights for software
>documentation, although I'm sure that they exist (companies that sell
>popular desktop software, such as Microsoft, for example). Most companies
>don't. I think the vast majority of user guides, etc. aren't worth the time
>and minimal expense it would take to register them, as they are so specific
>to one company's product. Who would want to rip it off, and for what
>purpose? And if they do, how would you ever know and what would the damages
>be?

One of my clients, a process control engineering firm, registered the
manual for a new product they had just spent years developing.  Here's why:
when the product first went to market, there were NO other products that
did the same thing.  

And guess what?  They ended up going to court on a copyright infringement
lawsuit, and they won.  Seems their client had left a manual sitting out
where it shouldn't have been, and a competitor managed to get hold of it.
A little reverse engineering, and voila! a competing product hit the market.

My client took 'em to court, and won.  I don't know what the damages were
(this was before they were my client), but I would bet the amount was
significant.  I do know that the competing process control engineering firm
no longer has a Canadian subsidiary.

Win
------------------
Win Day
Technical Writer

http://www.wordsplus.net

mailto:winday -at- wordsplus -dot- net