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From: markb@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Mark Biggar)
Newsgroups: net.followup,net.news,net.legal
Subject: Re: Copyright Violations
Message-ID: <936@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Mar-84 19:32:19 EST
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.936
Posted: Thu Mar 22 19:32:19 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Mar-84 08:15:48 EST
References: <778@nsc.UUCP> <6946@unc.UUCP>
Reply-To: markb@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Mark Biggar)
Organization: System Development Corporation, Santa Monica
Lines: 17

In article <6946@unc.UUCP> tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>The copyright law includes in its "fair use" provisions an allowance for
>publication of short extracts from copyrighted works for critical purposes.
>Given this, while it would still be illeagl to publish, say, the complete
>source of awk(1), you would not be violating the law to publish, say, twenty
>lines of code for the purpose of commenting on the quality of the code, or
>in an article on programming styles, etc.
>
>Does anyone know if there are additional restrictions on software that would
>forbid this?

If there are no additional restrictions on software, this provision obviously
covers the standard practice of extracting the revelent code context
when reporting a bug fix over the net.

Mark Biggar
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!markb