Let’s see, you have a molecule that “walks” along the microtubule so you use footlike structures to represent it. That means you own the concept of feet. That’s as dumb as McIntosh claiming they owned the use of file folders and trash cans as icons way back when. It’s an obvious visual metaphor.

The idea that this constitutes plagiarism or copyright infringement is scary. It’s a far worse threat to intellectual freedom than anything the ID folks or creationists have dreamed up.

We’ve got, what, 20+ posts by grown people on something this trivial? Aren’t there more important faults in “Expelled” to worry about?

I would only add that even if we were to assume arguendo that Harvard and not XVIVO is the true copyright owner, this would probably only mean for Premise’s current DJ action that Harvard would be subject to compulsory joinder.

Ichneumon: In short, William Wallace and the folks at Uncommon Descent understand copyrights about as well as they understand science.

Double underhand triple-reverse backspinning bitchslap! Full Point to Ichneumon!

And I would be very surprised if William Wallace has a better grasp of XVIVO’s standing than XVIVO and their lawyers do…

WW appears to be unaware of the fact that copyright isn’t as simple, or “all-or-nothing”, as he imagines it to be. In many cases entity X will own the copyright on a work which contains elements copyrighted by Y. This in no way means that X is now the owner of the copyright of those elements.

For a well-known example, a movie (e.g. “Silence of the Lambs”) will be copyrighted by the movie studio which produced it, but contain songs (“American Girl”) that are still copyrighted by the original artists (Tom Petty). It may also contain characters (e.g. Hannibal Lecter) copyrighted by the original author (Thomas Harris).

A movie will usually explicitly list the licensed properties, out of courtesy or as a requirement of the license agreement, but shorter works that don’t have the luxury of a lengthy credits roll (such as video shorts or songs that sample other songs) usually don’t or can’t. Copyright law makes no such requirement, and the original owners don’t lose their copyright just because they aren’t mentioned when the owner of a derivative work asserts their own copyright with respect to the work that contains elements copyrighted by others.

In short, William Wallace and the folks at Uncommon Descent understand copyrights about as well as they understand science.

Please please please – let me have a guess.

(Hey man – my name *is* “Buhler”, right?)