24 Feb
2017
24 Feb
'17
5:06 a.m.
And given the Unix-based CS study and research going on world-wide at the time, AT&T
versus the
Regents of the University of California at Berkeley is an example of why you must maintain
a careful
separation of the arts of sticking your foot in your mouth and shooting yourself in the
foot. Medical
authorities warn against it, and who am I to dispute them? :)
FWVLIW
Wesley Parish
Quoting Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com>:
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 14:15, Clem Cole wrote:
lawyer
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:51 PM, Paul Ruizendaal
<pnr(a)planet.nl>
wrote:
> I'm not a lawyer, but wasn't part of the background that prior to
1988
> in US law one could not claim both copyright
and trade secret
protection,
> and that for something to be copyrighted it
had to expressly claim
to
be
copyrighted material, and be registered as such?
âTake this with what its worth (it came for free and I'm not a ....) > Your comment got me thinking, why
would try to change and can
you. So I
asked on our patent counsel this am to explain
the difference. For
context in the USA we have Patent, Trade Secret, Copyright
Registration and
Copyright Protection. Her reply to me was:
Copyright *protection* is automatic â as soon as the code is written
it
is
considered protected. Copyright *registration* is just a formality
necessary to instigate litigation. There is no time limit for
registration.
That's true today, but to my understanding wasn't true in 1988. (Well,
registration wasn't a requirement to be copyrighted - that requirement
went away retroactively in 1978, and only applied to unpublished works
then.) The change seems to have been March 1, 1989 from what I can
find.
I think AT&T *tried* to construct a basis to claim that UNIX source
code
was "unpublished", even when distributed to source licensees (or e.g.
shell scripts which were by necessity distributed to all licensees),
possibly in service of this trade secret theory. Remember, the infamous
comment on the otherwise empty SVR2 /bin/true had two lines of
copyright
notice and three lines of assertion that it was unpublished.
And if that attempt involved removing all copyright notices from V6,
V7,
and 32V (and presumably not registering any copyright on any
"unpublished" works pre-1978) then that might have killed any
copyright-based case. By the time the actual lawsuit happened, they
were
fully committed to the trade secret theory.
Dennis Ritchie wrote:
>
> "Paul" <pssawyer(a)comcast.net.INVALID> wrote in message >>
> ....
>> ISTR there was a copyright notice in a Sys V /bin/true; explaining
>> why we thought this was funny might be a violation of that
copyright!
>
> The local lawyers here also flip-flopped over the copyright issue.
> I can't recall whether it was because of law changes or
reinterpretation
> or whether they just changed their minds.
The issue partly had to
do
> with the question of whether a copyright
claim amounted to
publication,
> while their primary protection theory had to
do with trade secret
> protection, and its possible conflict with publication.
>
> At any rate, here is the whole contents of /bin/true in SVr2:
>
> # Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T
> # All Rights Reserved
>
> # THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
> # The copyright notice above does not evidence any
> # actual or intended publication of such source code.
>
> #ident "@(#)true:true.sh 1.4"