> And finally, we (Rikk and Gavin) don't feel like we are legally
> competent enough to use the term "public domain". Hopefully, this
> statement is enough to quell any fears of legal action from SGI if
> Inventor's file format is used as the basis for VRML.
In working with something entirely different I have heard that the current
state of US computer law is that it is not possible to effectivly "protect" any
form of human readable based computer language, but that user interface
(LAF) issues in any development environment for the language are another
matter. In other words, you may create a language/environment which will
read and "run" code written in a "proprietary" language, including exactly
emulating the look and feel (very important here) of an application created
using the language, but you can't produce an environment for, say, authoring
"BERTOSCRIPT" which looks and acts like Bert's BERTOSCIPT environment,
if Bert has taken suffitient measures to protect emself. Hope people find this
interesting ....
This is not a legal opinion from myself or progress and should not
be concidered as such .....
Mike (tamarac)