PATNEWS firebrand Greg Aharonian has offered up for comments his first attempt to connect the myriad of terms and standards used in patent and copyright laws and cases, as they apply to software. The diagram is a mess, which is not surprising considering the forest of conflict it's intended to summarize and formalize. Whether you agree with Aharonian's specific formulation or not, it's interesting to consider an axiomatic (and therefore more formalizable) approach to relating these terms and concepts. An agreed-upon formalization could make for much less confusion in practicing the art and (one hopes) make for more reasonable evolution of intellectual property law into new technologies.