Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!gatech!rebel!george From: george@rebel.UUCP (George M. Sipe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: a couple quickies / copyright Message-ID: <23133@rebel.UUCP> Date: 7 Jan 88 17:16:32 GMT References: <11140@brl-adm.ARPA> <6967@brl-smoke.ARPA> Reply-To: george@rebel.UUCP (George M. Sipe) Organization: Tolerant Systems, Atlanta GA Lines: 53 In article <6967@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) ) writes: >In article <11140@brl-adm.ARPA> TLIMONCE%DREW.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes: >>My understanding is that the drafts and the actual standard are released >>into the public domain. Correct? > >I can't give a definitive answer to this. The X3J11 committee working >drafts have been neither Copyright nor published. Some standards are >Copyright, but I don't know if any ANSI or ISO standards are nor whether >this one will be. That is not something that X3J11 decides. It is my understanding that the IEEE applies copyright protection to their standards as a means to prohibit people from changing the text without authorization. I always believed that it was really done to generate revenue. As for ANSI and ISO I have no idea what their policies are. In any event, it is a disservice to the community for whom a standard is to serve to withhold wide dissemination of a proposed standard. >>If so, would their be any problems >>with someone sending copies of the next draft electronically? If I get >>a hard-copy, I can scan it into an ASCII file and send it to anyone who >>asks. >The master source for the draft is troff input, using a possibly modified >version of the -mm macros, I believe. It has not been made available >electronically to anybody that I know of, despite requests, because it >is not in the committee's charter and there is no volunteer to take care >of doing this. Until the question about Copyright is resolved, you >shouldn't copy the document in any form. If the only reason it is not being distributed electronically is because no volunteer could be found to answer mail requests or provide UUCP access then I'll do it. I'd bet many others would too. In order to resolve its copyright status, merely look at a published draft. If it does not have a proper copyright notice along the lines of "Copyright (c) 198x by somebody or something" then it is in the public domain. If such a notice was inadvertently omitted from a published draft but added to later versions, then the one without it is still in the public domain. In such a situation, the later version copyright applies only to the changes. The original work, having entered the public domain, stays in the public domain. From that anyone may make a derived work to which they may apply their own copyright (covering only their changes). Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer. If you need to depend on the above seek the advice of a lawyer. The opinions represented here are mine, unless you don't agree with them - in which case they are someone else's :-). In any case, they aren't necessarily those of my company. -- George M. Sipe, Phone: (404) 662-1533 Tolerant Systems, 6961 Peachtree Industrial, Norcross, GA 30071 UUCP: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,rutgers,seismo}!gatech!rebel!george