All true tilly, thanks for the reminders. I do have sympathy for anybody expected to do such a significant job with such long-term ramifications, especially when they're not being trained, have no apparant working system to reasonably and/or quickly resolve the lack of knowledge they must have to confront with every application in a limitless number of fields.

In this particular case, my real beef is that even a modicum of knowledge could have indicated the silliness of the approval. That beef extends when whoever is responsible, the people working the claims and their supervisors, budget authorities, and others, don't fight to increase their knowledge before making such bellweather decisions.

They should at least be able to realize when they don't know enough, and act to increase their knowledge, or get advice or issue RFC's...

Ignorance is sometimes the culprit, but the devil is in the failure to cure the knowledge gap. Feeling stupid (which one shouldn't) by asking questions isn't near as fatal as increasing stupidity by not asking, and by not doing one's own research.

On the job, we work to train as much and as often as we can, especially on-the-fly, to help ourselves. It is a constant, uphill effort. Sometime it seems that none of us know enough often enough. The industry environment, the technologies, the business models and needs, are all moving targets. It's working out fine, but it is amazing how much new there is to know and succeed with.

Sometimes I wonder if the complexity, expense (including expenses to defend yourself after you've succeeded in a patent or other IP ownership) and 'broken-ness' of the patent/trademark/copyright isn't really a very good component in explaining the success of open source projects.

Note on the original post in thread:

Advice, passing conversation and reading various publications have led others and myself to think the following about intellectual property protections:

- Overall design, meaning the look and feel, may fall under "trade dress" protections.
- We assume that content is owned by the author.
- Our original content is owned by us. We assume that if we rewrite someone else's writing, by and large we're protected, since we wrote it. However, this is highly suspect and present some risk, as well as damage to one's honor...

- Owning the HTML-based presentation on a web site probably falls under 'trade dress' as above, but the configuration and patterns within the HTML structure are simply usage of a published standard and not protectable.

- Back-end code we've written to support any interface, web or not, is ours.

- Whether a web page is 'one object' and copyright-able could be debatable. If it contains the works of others, appropriate attributions must be given, and in many cases, permission to use must be obtained (research 'fair use').

Is any of this useful? I dunno. YMMV. It's certainly not any kind of useful advice, except to maybe take a stab at pointing towards other research to do. Hope it helps though.

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