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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, October 03 2012 @ 02:40 PM EDT |
There was a time when the U.S. law was intended to encourage the publication of
advances in knowledge. For obvious reasons, a "copyright" which was
exercised merely by preventing ANYONE publishing something was counter to the
only permissable purpose of the right. It was "PUBLISH it or lose it."
(And "publication in Outer Mongolia" obviously does nothing to
encourage dissemination of knowledge in the U.S.--no, it had to be PUBLISHED in
the U.S. to be COPYRIGHTABLE in the U.S.)
Hence, computer source code, not being published, wasn't copyrightable. (It
usually didn't matter, since it was typically so tied to particular hardware
that it had no independent value.)
I was at a hardware manufacturer when the idea began being floated that you
could both copyright something AND declare it "trade secret" at the
same time. The fundamental conflict between this and the U.S. copyright ideal is
obvious. But it's reasonable to say that "something" should be do-able
to protect source code if the OBJECT code was to be copyrightable (as it should
have been, since it WAS published.)
In the long run, it probably didn't matter, since the Eurofeudal notion of
hereditary ranks of nobility has subsumed the concept of copyright. And we're
all living in a world where the vast majority of works go out of print within 5
years of the author's death--but don't go into the public domain for a couple of
generations.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, October 03 2012 @ 03:59 PM EDT |
My guess for why legal departments are adamant about Copyright notices is that
they want to get the offending party on the hook for wilful infringement.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: soronlin on Wednesday, October 03 2012 @ 04:11 PM EDT |
Each author retains copyright to the code that they write.
In some FOSS projects that is the same license as the original and you end up
with hundreds of authors all with rights over the code. Take a look at the
Wireshark "Authors" file.
In some other projects, submissions are only accepted if they are licensed with
a more permissive license so that the project maintainers can use them and
control the license over the whole codebase.
Both approaches have plus and minus points.
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