Tag: copyright

Puter’s “Everything” Project Changes Everything

The world just changed. But only some are surprised.

Last week, a news story went mostly unnoticed. A company called ArtCraft released “clones” of all of Adobe’s most popular software products. These versions are not sold under Adobe brands and are not copies of the Adobe software (which is closed source and proprietary), but were reimplemented to match the feature set of the Adobe applications.

Some people in the tech industry will undoubtedly react to this development by bemoaning the death of copyright in software applications. They will dress in funerary garb and take the moral high ground, ostensibly defending the artistry of developers and their ability to enforce the copyright in their work. But software is not art.

Others of us found this development entirely unsurprising.

It’s fitting that the disruption happened to Adobe first. Adobe is one of the last bastions of proprietary mass-market software. For years now, it has been alienating its customer base by forcing them to move from local desktop software to SaaS (with the insult-to-injury of a complicated and clunky desktop app to police its license keys), raising prices to the point that they are truly painful for individuals, applying draconian cancellation fees for subscriptions, and using the Microsoft/Apple trick of grabbing data for cloud storage to lock users in to their platform. (Reddit commenters in the above link use phrases like “It’s infuriating to see how much contempt they show for the customers who rely on them” and “It’s incredible to see how much they hate the people who use their products.”)

One of the most popular ways of thinking up commercial open source business plans is to ask the question: “What proprietary software does everyone use, and does everyone hate? Now replace it with a more modern product that is easier to use, doesn’t lock in price increases, and has less bloated feature sets.” If you posed that initial question to consumers over the last 5 to 10 years, their first answer would probably have been the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Adobe First, Now…Everything

But the ArtCraft release was only a small pre-shock before today’s announcement. Today, the commercial open source company Puter released 50 applications – including replacements for the Microsoft Office suite. In other words, you can get access to every application you are likely to need for your daily work from one source, but instead of having to overpay for a bloated legacy product that struggles in a cloud environment, you get the transparency of open source software, attractive pricing, and modern, cloud-native implementation. You don’t need a slew of enterprise software app accounts, and you don’t need any local software – but if you happen to want the code, you can get it, and customize it to your needs, because it’s all open source under the MIT license.

Moreover, there is an AI app builder that allows you to build pretty much any other application you want.

Post-Copyright for Applications

Don’t mourn the death of software applications; in fact, this is the beginning of a new life for them. We are all going back to the basics to learn why software is valuable. For years, software programming has been cumbersome, slow, and labor-intensive. Have you ever wanted an app that didn’t exist? Or a feature you needed? Well, you were out of luck, because it was too much work to create it and debug and deploy it, even on “open” platforms like iOS, and even in open source projects. Then along came AI coding models. And now, basic coding is relatively quick and easy. That doesn’t mean there is no effort in writing good applications, but it does mean that a lot of the slogging is gone.

If you can step out of the copyright mindset, you might realize that software is a functional tool that is weird subject matter for copyright in the first place. In fact, at the beginning of the software era, people did not assume software was subject to copyright at all. Those were the days before closed source (and then, open source, which was a reaction to it), when software was a freebie that hardware companies provided in order to get you to buy their equipment. History is repeating itself.

Software is not an “IP” Business

The notion that software development is about protecting intellectual property like copyrights and patents is a thinking mistake that can be laid partly at the feet of intellectual property lawyers (of which I am one). Take a look at the agenda of any technology-related legal conference, and you see a sea of descriptions about “protection” of intellectual property. But the lawyers who represent the software business often have precious little to say about balancing IP protection against the goals of product quality or providing what users want or need.

Protecting intellectual property is the business of an intellectual property enforcer. That is done via litigation. IP protection is the basis of an entire industry for “patent assertion entities,” i.e., patent trolls. Copyright lawsuits over software are not as common, but when they happen, they are usually about trying to protect legacy products that are dying because the marketplace has left them behind. Businesspeople who are focused on “IP protection” have bought into a concept sold to them by IP lawyers or MBA classes, and sometimes don’t care about their products as much as monetizing their intellectual property assets. That mindset is a short-term business philosophy that almost ensures good products will not result. The main tool of an IP business is litigation. The main goal of a software business is customer satisfaction.

Can Application Developers Survive?

Yes. It is absolutely possibly to build software businesses in the post-copyright world. If you’re wondering how, all you need to do is look at what commercial open source strategists – like me – have been saying for the past decade. Commercial open source businesses are hugely popular and successful. Proprietary software is dying, because software never should have been about protecting intellectual property. It should be about creating products that make people’s lives easier.

Those who bemoan the death of copyright in software applications usually ask: if I put my effort into creating these applications, but I can’t sue people for copying it, how will I get compensated for it? The answer to that question has also been clear for a long time, and is well-understood by commercial open source software businesses. You need to build great products. You to sell them to people who like your products. They are not buying IP. They are buying solutions to their problems.

The intellectual property you do have is a brand, and that represents reputation and goodwill. In legal terms, it is a trademark.

From today forward, software IP will be about branding. Those who create the best products will win the market. Maybe there will be 1,000 clones of Microsoft Office, but then the market will ask: which one is the best? Only a few winners will emerge. A market cannot absorb 1,000 brands, only a few. This shift of emphasis to branding will re-align software developers and software users. For users, quality and ease of use was always the question. But proprietary software companies too often forgot that this was so, and built businesses around “monetizing” users. If you are sitting in a board room or a sales meeting, and someone starts talking about extracting more money from existing customers without giving them more value, you should sell your stock and quit, because your company is doomed. It has forgotten what its business is about.

Why You Can’t Really Vibe Code…Yet

All this is happening because of the availability of vibe coding (AI “clean room” reimplementation). But if you look beneath the hood, there is a lot of hand waving and FOMO about the ease of vibe coding. Yes, it is easy to get an AI to write and application. But when people tell me about their vibe coding projects, I always ask them: once you wrote your application, how did you serve and store it? The answer is usually “I got my IT department to do it.” And…that’s the problem. Actual deployment is still too difficult for most users.

While ArtCraft and Puter may be some of the first movers in this new software world, they will not be the last. The coming year or two will likely see a slew of new apps. The differentiating factor – along with app quality – will be how easy the apps are to deploy. Platform matters. (That is where Puter particularly shines; it’s a native cloud platform that is plug-and-play for the user.)

Go Have Fun!

You owe it to yourself to check out Puter and its ready-made apps for “Everything.” The current app versions are excellent starts and they will keep improving. My favorites are spreadsheet, word processing, invoicing, and video conferencing. (I wrote one to help me learn Hindi!) The platform also has some fun games and lots of other choices, and if you don’t like those, you can build your own.

Enjoy the new world!

I want to be clear: My comments about changes in the software business are, in my view, objective. I’ve been saying most of them for years. But when it comes to Puter, I am an investor and I am not objective. I think their business model is the future of software.

The AMA Must Defend its Paywall on CPT Codes

On August 12, 2026, a legal action was filed, called PatientRightsAdvocate.org, Inc. v. American Medical Association (N.D. Ill.). Declaratory Judgment Action re: Copyrightability of CPT Codes. In my view, this case has deep public policy implications.

Once, many years ago, I helped a client in the health care software business negotiate a license for the use of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes. I had never heard of CPT codes before that time. What I learned during that negotiation left me amazed and dismayed, and now, over a decade later, I am pleased to see that an advocacy organization has brought a legal action to remedy the situation.

PatientRightsAdvocate.org, Inc. (PRA), a nonprofit healthcare-transparency advocate, filed a declaratory judgment action to confirm that it may freely publish the CPT codes on its website without liability for copyright infringement. The case is a Declaratory Judgment (DJ) action–not asking for damages for a plaintiff as in a typical lawsuit, but asking the court to make a statement of the absence of liability, on behalf of the party filing the action (and is at risk as a defendant in a potential lawsuit). The DJ action has asked the court to confirm that (1) CPT is not copyrightable, (2) even if it is protected by copyright, posting it would be fair use, and (3) the AMA’s copyright, even if valid, is unenforceable due to copyright misuse.

CPT’s Liberation Matters To Everyone in the US

CPT is a set of five-digit codes and descriptions that the AMA has published since 1966 to classify medical procedures and services. The AMA revises CPT annually, asserting a new copyright in each annual revision, and sells access to it. The access fees are significant. A physical copy costs about $140, and end-user license agreements for electronic use (such as in software) require royalties on a per-user or per-member basis. For a moderately sized health technology business, this can run to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. In 2025, the AMA reported $296.4 million in revenue from books and digital content, netting $267.5 million in profit–apparently largely from licensing CPT.

Consider that a moment: over a quarter of a billion a year for licensing codes. Nice work if you can get it, but no one should be able to get it.

The problem is that healthcare businesses are required by law to use CPT codes. In 1977, Congress directed the predecessor of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to create a uniform medical procedure coding system, which led to the creation of CPT. According to the DJ action, a 1983 license agreement requires the government to adopt and use CPT for Medicare and Medicaid and to publicly endorse it, while the AMA controls the editorial panel that revises the codes. That means every medicare claim must be coded with CPT codes.

HHS regulations implementing HIPAA designate CPT as the mandatory code set for electronic healthcare billing transactions. 42 U.S.C. §1320d-2(c). According to the DJ action, at least 45 states also require the use of CPT via their own regulations, and at least 15 expressly incorporate it by reference into their administrative codes.

The AMA is primarily a lobbying organization. The AMA has donated between $1.6 million and $3.4 million in election cycles between 1990 and 2020. According to the logic in the DJ action, most of that money comes from licensing CPT codes.

The DJ Action’s Claims

PRA contends that because CPT has been hard-coded (pun intended) into federal and state law, and because CMS historically held a voting seat on the AMA’s CPT Editorial Panel, the CPT set falls outside copyright protection under the “government edicts” doctrine–under which the text of laws are not protected by copyright. This, in turn, is based on the idea that access to the text of the law should be available to everyone.

The AMA, for its part, has long defended CPT as its private intellectual property — including an amicus brief in ASTM v. UpCodes, Inc. (3d Cir. 2026) arguing incorporation into law does not defeat copyright and that posting such codes online is not fair use.

What is a CPT Code?

Here are some examples, so you can assess the copyrightibility of this work of authorship on your own. Remember that copyright law protects expression, not facts.

And by the way, my friendly AI refused to pull examples for me, because they are paywalled. So the following examples are not precisely CPT codes: they are HCPCS Level II codes. The distinction between CPT codes and HCPCS codes, however, is subject matter, not form. The CPT consists of codes for what physicians and clinicians do, and the HCPCS codes are codes for ancillary products and services (such as supplies, equipment, ambulance transport, and non-physician services). Together, the two make up the full HCPCS system CMS requires for Medicare and Medicaid billing.

  1. A0425 — Ground mileage, per statute mile
  2. A0428 — Ambulance service, basic life support, non-emergency transport (BLS)
  3. E0114 — Crutches, underarm, other than wood, adjustable or fixed, pair, with pads, tips and handgrips
  4. E1130 — Standard wheelchair, fixed full length arms, fixed or swing away detachable footrests
  5. G0008 — Administration of influenza virus vaccine
  6. J1885 — Injection, ketorolac tromethamine, per 15 mg
  7. Q0091 — Screening papanicolaou smear; obtaining, preparing and conveyance of cervical or vaginal smear to laboratory

Ah, the beauty and expressiveness of this work of authorship overwhelms me! What poet came up with “Administration of influenza virus vaccine”?

This is factual material and deserves no copyright protection at all. And to the extent it might, the fact that these codes are legally mandated for use–as factual material–should mean, as a matter of policy, there can be no liability for copying them.

Why This Matters

So to be clear: Your healthcare providers are required by the government to use CPT codes. They pay high royalties to the AMA to do so. The AMA uses that money to fund campaigns and gain influence with the government.

It’s time to end this vicious circle. Good luck to the plaintiff here.