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Re: question about copyrights and "open" standards.
Subject:Re: question about copyrights and "open" standards. From:John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:Matthew Kaster <matthewkaster -at- yahoo -dot- com>, techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 17 Aug 2006 12:12:00 -0700 (PDT)
Dimensions are dimensions and they'd be the same regardless of where
the came from; a ruller or a spec sheet.
>> papers are all freely available on the web, but they
>> are also clearly copyrighted. In this case the
The document is under copyright, not the dimensions. If you need to
include dimensions, what are you going to do...not say how big your
board is because someone already used, for example, 7.25"
> My question: If a specification paper is freely
> available but copyrighted, are the numbers considered
> copyright material as well? Can I include stuff like
No. However, the board may be covered under a patent, which WOULD
cover the dimensions
> For example: it would be much better to say ?our board
> is X by Y inches in size, per the Specification (see
> link)? instead of ?I can?t list the exact dimensions
> for our product because it's a knock-off; please refer
> to our competitors web-site.? OK I?m exaggerating a
> bit, but you can clearly see how silly it could get.
> I?m willing to write my own manual, but without those
> numbers it?s going to be a pretty useless document.
Just say:
Our board is X by Y inches in size. It is.
It's like building material. A sheet of plywood may be 48" x 72". It
simply is. Just because Boise Cascade has a line of plywood sheets
that are 48" x 72", does that mean that "Kaster Wood and Word
Products" cannot issue a spec sheet on your plywood sheets, saying
the sheet is 48" x 72"?
John Posada
Senior Technical Writer
"I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is."
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