RE: [Heartlogic-dev] rumination prototype

[William L. Jarrold]

On Sat, 7 May 2005, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> On Sat, 2005-05-07 at 09:27 -0700, Josh White wrote:

<....>

> > Any objections to having the personality ("HAL believes...") stuff?  I think
> > it helps newcomers give context to their role in rating a random factual
> > statement.
>
> Bill was making noise about "HAL" potentially being copyrighted.  I'm
> waiting for a decision.

I think we'd be find with keeping it as HAL.  I just googled on
HAL AI Kubrick and got over 16K hits.  I think the world would be
a very silly place if we were not allowed to mention names like
"HAL", "Mork", "Mindy", "Frankenstein", "ET", etc etc without paying
some big filmhouse.  I say we ignore this as a ridiculous and paranoid 
digression of mine...By the time we get up to, say, 100 or 1000 hits we 
should make sure we get an opinion from a lawyer friend of ours.  My 
friend Brandi will be done with law school in a few weeks.  I'll ask her
next time I see her.

Copyright is meant to protect whole passages.  Not names.  Trademark is
meant to protect names.  So, if we called our program Coke or Pepsi
or maybe Cyc or Deep Blue, then we'd be more apt to get in trouble.

Bill

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