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From: ddl@husc6.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Public Domain (?) Yacc (Important) [I TOLD the NET SO!!]
Message-ID: <1191@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Feb-87 18:46:16 EST
Article-I.D.: husc6.1191
Posted: Sun Feb  8 18:46:16 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Feb-87 05:04:54 EST
References: <142@ems.UUCP> <464@yetti.UUCP> <1186@husc6.UUCP> <3056@gitpyr.gatech.EDU>
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Lines: 58

In article <3056@gitpyr.gatech.EDU>, thomps@gitpyr.gatech.EDU (Ken Thompson) writes:
> Those of us who would like to see the net continue to exist need to 
> protect the legal integrity of the net. If AT&T decided to legally 
> challenge a number of major backbone sites the net might quickly cease
> to exist. Most would probably simply drop the net like  hot potato.

	Are you sure this is the "legal integrity" of the net and not
the AT&T-compatibility of the net?  I suspect that if I decided to legally
challenge the net because of something I thought was stolen from me then
nobody would even notice.  This is because I can't aford a good (set of)
lawyer(s).  Does might make right?  In other words, if the reason for not
doing X is that X is illegal, and even that the law will punish you for
doing X, then that is reasonable.  On the other hand, if the reason for
not doing X is that X's owner can sue you out of existence, then the "law"
is strongly biased in favor of might.  Note that I am *not* talking about
the morality of stealing software; this is a completely different issue.

> On what basis to you state that they have not taken steps to protect it.
> Just because someone mahages to rip off proprietary data does not mean
> that the company now loses all rights to the proprietary data. In fact,
> I believe that any entity which knowingly makes use of such data is
> subject to potential legal and civil penalties. I seem to recall some
> Japanese companies settling out of court with IBM for a significant
> amount of money based on theft of proprietary information. 

	Well, in fact, that's the question.  If the public knows your
proprietary information, and you didn't protect it in any other way,
then how can it still be proprietary?  Proprietary implies secret.
The key words in your IBM example are "settling out of court."  Like AT&T,
IBM has the power to intimidate.  No matter how legally right you are,
you probably can't aford to go to court against IBM or AT&T (or Apple...).
This kind of protection works only for large comapnies; not for individuals.

> Remember that proprietary information is most often lost through employee
> theft. 

	Yes, that's what I always thought.  I also thought that such employees
were the ones liable for the theft.  (For that matter, they should be the
only ones capable of the theft since the information was supposedly
proprieatry.)

	Consider the problem you create by claiming that public information
can be proprietary.  In order to verify the status of any work you must
ask a potentially unlimitted number of authors if it really belongs to them.
Beyond the unreasonable resources that it would take to acomplish this, you
must "trust" all the responses you get since you are not allowed to "see"
the proprietary material of those authors.  Public domain status would
effectively vanish because any entity that made proprietary changes to
public code could easilly tell you that the code belonged to it.
	Now, even if you insist that all of this is reasonable, about
the best you could ask for the research phase is a public discussion in
which a potential author should come forward and claim rights to "his"
work.  We have been having just such a discussion and AT&T hasn't claimed
yacc.  Why are so many people outside of AT&T so anxious to do so for it?


					Dan Lanciani
					ddl@harvard.*