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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: uucp source copyright status - IMPORTANT
Message-ID: <7866@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 4-Apr-87 02:19:49 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.7866
Posted: Sat Apr  4 02:19:49 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 4-Apr-87 02:19:49 EST
References: <480@gouldsd.UUCP> <694@brl-sem.ARPA> <73@bnl.UUCP> <533@van-bc.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 32

> Does AT&T have some insidious method of permuting each source file in an 
> identifiable manner so that they can track down which sites have been 
> careless about source control :-).

Don't laugh, I can think of some really insidious ways of doing this that
nobody is ever likely to notice.  Not on a file-by-file basis, but enough
to trace an entire distribution or a major portion thereof.

> What about those licenses that are no longer in business, the receiver comes
> in and auctions off all of those tapes at about $.50 each? ...

I think that if you look at your license, you will probably find clauses
explicitly covering failure of business.  Auctioning off those tapes without
paying attention to the possibility of them containing proprietary software
would be a rather dangerous thing to do.  (Also a rather stupid thing --
stuff like customer lists can be very valuable, and don't think the creditors
don't know it.)

> Just how many grad students do you know who have complete version 7, or BSD,
> or System III/V source tapes hidden away? Some trade secret huh.

There are undoubtedly a *lot* of unauthorized copies of Unix stuff and even
entire Unix distributions floating about.  It just might be possible to win
a court battle on the claim that AT&T has taken inadequate precautions and
can no longer realistically class Unix as a secret.  (Trade secret protection
does require you to really treat the stuff as a secret, and take reasonable
precautions to protect it.)  However, I doubt that anybody short of IBM could
possibly finance such a battle, since AT&T would almost certainly take a
cost-is-no-object victory-at-any-price attitude to such a situation.
-- 
"We must choose: the stars or	Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
the dust.  Which shall it be?"	{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry