Fuzziness versus all or nothing

Looks at the question whether law, particularly intellectual property law as applied to electronic systems, might benefit from a stiff dose of fuzzy logic. Intellectual property law has enjoyed a kind of fuzzy logic in the past. An example is the piece of copyright law proceeding from the premise that a computer program is a literary work like a poem or a novel, whose plot and other nonliteral aspects are legally protected, and therefore a computer program should enjoy legal protection of its nonliteral aspects, such as the patterns of commands and key strokes that actuate the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. That is not the kind of fuzzy logic considered. The author looks at Zadehian fuzzy logic, as contrasted with Aristotelian or Boolean logic. The law in general, and intellectual property law is no exception, tends to take an all or nothing (binary) attitude about everything.<
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