Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!elroy!gryphon!richard From: richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: PD or Shareware Copyrights Message-ID: <17126@gryphon.COM> Date: 26 Jun 89 15:37:53 GMT Reply-To: richard@gryphon.COM (Richard Sexton) Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, CA Lines: 46 In article shadow@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven T. Corzine) writes: > >>Adding a Copyright notice to "something" in the public domain doesn't >>make the work any less PD than it was before. Period. One can only > >It doesn't make the *original* work any less PD. I already said that. >But it does make the modified work "less PD"... Granted, addong ONLY >a comment may be carrying it to extremes a bit, but an argument could >be made that a simple comment is "code". And I know of no restriction >which requires a author to give up rights even to trivial code added >to a Public Domain program. Of course the original work is still in >the public domain. But the author of the stupid, trivial comment is >within his rights (again, to my alleged knowledge) to restrict >distribution of that modification. (if someone stripped that comment, >it would be back to the PD work instead, with no restrictions) Now, >clearly, no one would actually bother to add just a comment, but >adding some piece of functionality (large or small) is quite possible. Pretty thin ice and a bad analogy to boot. First of all, the courts have held that the amount of changes required to make a program different from another is about 30%. If you take a PD program and add a few lines of code, it's still considered PD. Don't argue with me, I dont care. This is what the courts have held. The argumrnt that you could add a comment and claim it's yours is also pretty dumb, as while it's true for the SOURCE only, you have no way of showing the binary contains your comment. You are correct about your modifications are subject to your own copyright. >I never studied or researched the legal definition of a "derived work" >as pertains to copyright law; I merely applied common sense (which is >admittedly uncommon to find in legalese) and noted that it would seem >reasonable to consider a reverse-engineered work to be "derived"... The set of common sense and the law is not a union. ``It doesnt have to be fair or make sense, it just has to be legal'' James J. Coyle in People vs. Brown Show Co. -- New Zealand. Where sheep outnumber people eighty to one. richard@gryphon.COM decwrl!gryphon!richard gryphon!richard@elroy.jpl.NASA.GOV