Working on design tutorial

[Kraj]

Hi Susan, my name is Greg, but thanks! I'm glad you've gotten some value out of my work.

As far as copyrighting is concerned, it's a tricky animal and I'm not an expert but here's my understanding:

Like you say for music, you can't copyright individual words or notes or chords. What you can do is copyright the work as a whole or significant and distinct portions of it.

As far as your collegue's design goes, the design is certainly copyrighted. Either he owns his design or the company he works for does. That means that you can't legally duplicate the entire database for yourself without permission, nor can you copy a signifcant portion - like the table structures - and then build the rest yourself.

What you certainly can do is take the concept and then build your own version from scratch. You know what you want the database to do, and you have a rough idea of how to do it. You're free to design your own version and, as long as it has significant differences unique to your version, you should have no worries about copyright infringement.

 

[Banana]

I'm not sure how this will really work out.

I mean, if you want to make a contact database, and if one were to follow the theory of database, normalizing the data and everything, the odds are it that the structure will be fundamentally same database after database, though the form or names may be slightly different.

Seem to me this would be really difficult to copyright, especially if one *needs* to have this structure to have a working database. But IANAL....

 

[Susan Owen]

Thanks, Greg, for the info. You're right, I should learn from it and take the best and build on it. There's no law against that. The concept is the important thing, and you can't copyright concepts and thoughts.

 

[Susan Owen]

It's not the normal way that you'd see a database designed, it's pretty different. Some things, like address tables are pretty usual, but the rest, the way of marking and tagging things, is very generic, that's what fascinates me about it.

 

[monacle]

Fantastic thread, thank you very much. Im coming into this from a sideways route which is even more confusing then starting afresh i think, as i deal with some VBA modification, query writing and database management of a pre-configured system with my colleagues in a completely different country and timezone!

This is the first time ive gone to build something from scratch so this info above is appreciated in terms of the collation of it all.... a mentor would be better but oh mighty forums, you will do for now

 

[Eyor]

This thread looks like it could benefit from the wiki format rather than a forum. As I've benefited much from this thread, I'd be happy to put up a wiki for it so the tutorial can be edited and discussed collaboratively as needed (I'll even splurge on the $15 to register a domain). Let me know if you all feel this would be of value, and feel free to make url suggestions.

 

[Banana]

That's friggin' brilliant idea I've heard of. It'd go long way toward creating more comprenhensive documenation than MS and VBA help files could ever hope to approach.

 

[Kraj]

If you think that would add value, you're welcome to post the tutorial. There are already Wiki's that address the topic, though.

 

[Banana]

I just did a cursory google search; and doesn't seem to be any Access wiki (besides the articles within the Wikipedia and external links). Maybe you could point the way?

 

[Eyor]

I also searched both for an access wiki and a database design wiki and found neither. Although, there are plenty of brief notes in some wiki's or individual blogs, I haven't found anything dedicated or very extensive. So, unless I hear otherwise, or someone points me to a good wiki for this (I'd rather not create a redundant site) I'm going to go ahead and setup a wiki this weekend.

Although I could tack this on to an existing web project I have going, I think it's better to go ahead and register a dedicated domain so please make suggestions. I'll start the suggestions list with:

1. www.accesswiki.org
2. www.dbnetdesign.org
3. www.accessdesign.org

Please pick one or feel free to propose your own suggestions.