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Authored by: Wol on Wednesday, October 03 2012 @ 05:02 AM EDT |
The law according to Berne is that EVERYTHING COPYRIGHTABLE is copyright from
the moment of creation. NOTHING is Public Domain unless copyright has timed out
(100 years or so depending on jurisdiction).
Your understanding is what US law was some *forty*? years ago? And iirc the US
implemented Berne fully twenty or thirty years ago (there's a confusing interim
period).
As for most of the rest of the world, Berne codifies what they were doing a
hundred years ago.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: DannyB on Wednesday, October 03 2012 @ 09:54 AM EDT |
> It is my understanding that source code must
> have a copyright statement in order
> to be covered by copyright.
It is my understanding that you are correct. Further, I believe that you have
five years to make a good faith effort to cure a defective copyright notice. I
do not know if a missing notice counts as defective.
For example, the following two copyright notices are defective:
1. Copyright 2010
2. COpyright Jane Doe.
The notice must have the year of first publication and the owner of the
copyright. If any of this is incorrect, I would be happy to see it corrected.
(Back in the day, almost 25 years ago, so it may be out of date, my employer
required all developers to read a fold out pamphlet from the copyright office
that explained a lot, and then a couple hours explanation from the lawyers with
Q&A time. There was a bit of rumbling about patents, but nothing too
serious. Software was not yet patentable. But they did want us to keep any
handwritten notes, drawings, etc that we made in something like a tablet so that
it showed a clear chronology of thinking about anything we were working on. You
never were to throw a full tablet away, you just added it to a stack.
Apparently they thought tablets, which you could not just insert pages into the
middle of, were somehow useful in court. This was back when we used handwriting
a lot more than today where we have software for drawing, graphs, flowcharts,
UML, etc. Funny thing is, we made lots more notes and drawings on napkins from
various local restaurants over lunch.)
---
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: hardmath on Wednesday, October 03 2012 @ 11:22 AM EDT |
I think that publishing with a copyright notice is not
currently equivalent
to placing a work in the public domain.
While this may have been the case at
one time, the US
copyright FAQ clearly contemplates
copyright registration of works
published without copyright
notice.
The history of legislation for
machine-readable
software copyright perhaps emphasizes
this possibility, as initially the
copyright law was not
applied except as to human-readable software (much of
which
went unpublished in order to protect it as trade
secrets).
--- "If FISA should ask, I was never here." Anonymous [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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