Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: The man who stopped tobacco advertising started the software industry

[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]John Banzhaf III was a lawyer who wanted to see if there was a way to get cigarette advertising off radio and television and worked hard to do so, lobbying Congress and the FTC to implement the laws and regulations to eliminate cigarette and eventually most tobacco ads on broadcast media. He happened to notice someone's computer program and asked about whether there was much money in selling them, but there wasn't because computer software wasn't considered copyrightable so there was no independent market for computer programs, basically you bought a computer and the manufacturer supplied you with the operating system, and maybe you worked inhouse for a large company to develop whatever apps they needed for their mainframe. (With a few expensive exceptions, PCs wouldn't exist for another 20 years, and part of the reason they did was because of what Banzhaf did next.) So Banzhaf learned how to code and wrote a program back around 1972 to compute the parameters for the tire size needed for a wheel, in Fortran, and submitted it with the fee, and it was accepted. The Copyright Office had a listing of Banzhaf's program up on display as the first computer program for which a copyright was granted. As one man successfully chased cigarette commercials off television and radio, he can also be created with dispelling the myth that computer programs were not copyrightable and thus making the independent software vendor business possible. [/quote]