24 Feb
2017
24 Feb
'17
4:48 a.m.
Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 14:15, Clem Cole wrote:
Copyright *protection* is automatic ??? 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went away retroactively in 1978, and only applied to unpublished works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. From what I have in mind, there have been changes from
around 1992 from the
Berne convention. Before, US code (even when it was
copyrighted) was not
protected in Europe.
I know that in former times, code was only copyrighted in the USA in case a
sample had been given to a governmental site. I thought this changed together
with the Berne convention....
Given that the AT&T code that was used by BSD does not have a copyright notice,
it seems to be obvious that it was not copyrighted as AT&T did not give a
sample to the government.
So the question was whether there was a copyright problem with the fact that
BSD included the code. The fact that AT&T did give away their code did exhaust
the right to prevent distribution.
BSD on the other side did bundle the right to distribute with the condition
that the license notice must not be removed and that distributors need to
announce that they include software developed at BSD.
AT&T removed this notice and did not announce the porevenance.
This is why BSD finally won...
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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