As the brave new world of object-oriented programming dawns, a host of people – software developers, manufacturers, consultants, lawyers – are rubbing their hands at all the additional business it will bring – lawyers? The bane of the popular music business these days is sampling, which in its most blatant form involves seizing passages from records by brilliant singers like Aretha Franklin or Loleatta Holliday and using them to soup up records by indifferent singers, and given the basic concept of object-orientation, it seems inevitable that wise guys will spot how easy it is to take an application apart, replace clumsily-written objects, add one or two new ones, borrow some from other programs, and put the agglomeration onto the market as a completely original application: gives a whole new meaning to the concept of ownership of objects, the prospect is of the US court system hopelessly tied up for the next 30 years with myriad bitter cases – how ever are juries or judges to decide who is innocent and who is guilty of the presently non-existent crime of object theft?
