CompuServe Messages

Hmmm. Well, lets look at a couple of issues with regard to "legal and ethical". First, the development of a new file format takes time and effort. This translates directly into costs to the developer. This seems clear. Now, if company B makes use of that effort without permission, company B is, without compensation, gaining from the fruits of company A's effort. There are grey areas; for instance, company B's loading a proprietary file type seems to enhance the USE of such a thing, and so directly benefit company A's bottom line by encouraging the use of said format. Saving a file type may also enhance company A's bottom line, because again, it promote's compatibility with company A's "wares". If company A's intention was to generate revenue from the exclusive use of a file type, then company B is behaving directly contrary to company A's wishes (although they may STILL enhance company A's revenue… wanting to make money a particular way and ACTUALLY making money that exact way are two different animals, I promise you). Either way, we have to start talking about the term "intellectual property" as an abstract. Comparing to land is fruitful here. If you walk across my land on my footpath, you've damaged nothing in particular, but you have walked on MY land. The law says that I can say you can't do that, period – and I can prosecute you if you do. Ownership and the right to manage the resources and objects that own are the underlying concepts. Land ownership is an intellectual convention. The land's not directly changed by ownership, and it'll be there when you're long dead. When a company develops a file format, do they – or better yet, should they – have the right to say "this is ours, you can't use it"? For a time, or permanently? Finally, should people (or companies) have the right to decide for themselves on a case by case basis, what "properties" they "should" be allowed to use no matter what the feelings of the "owners"? There is law addressing some, perhaps all, of this. I don't know if it's appropriate law, nor do I have a good answer to these questions. But I do get uncomfortable when declarations are made either way. A very good caase can be made from either side of the fence. Black Belt has been on both sides: We've decoded and supported as a result several "proprietary" formats; toaster framestores and DCTV both come to mind. In neither case have we used the knowledge in such a way as to work against the inventors; we've done things that clearly enhance the usability and distributability of those formats. Further, neither of these formats had worth in and of themselves; they were byproducts of the hardware technologies of both companies. Nonetheless, they were proprietary, and both "owners" of the formats were uncooperative. OTOH, Black Belt Systems has produced very useful new file formats for images which offer capabilities heretofore unavailable to users of image file formats (specifically high lossless compression). We worked long and hard to develop these capabilities, and consider them "ours" as a result. These file formats have worth in and of themselves (because of the lossless compression gain). What should our reaction be if another company reverse engineers them and so gains from our efforts? It's hard to say, and we might jump either way. I personally beleive that some kind of standard could – and should – be developed around the concept of worth that is a direct result of the format in question. That seems to be a good metric to use to determine what the real "worth" of a particular file format is. The issue is just not simple enough to point at and say "This here is how it be."