Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MEAN18 AUTHOR REPLIES TO POSTING:
Message-ID: <9960@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: 16 Mar 88 14:13:00 GMT
References: <235400004@prism> <235400005@prism>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 51

In article <235400005@prism> john@prism.TMC.COM writes:
| [...]
| Oh, come on.  A copyright is a reliable indicator that a piece of software is 
| copyrighted, and that is all you need to know, if you are thinking about 
| copying it for public distribution.  Otherwise, what does a copyright notice 
| mean?

  A copyright may reserve all right (the phrase 'all right reserved' is
standard), or allow some limited use.

Some qualifiers:
  "This program is hereby released to the public domain"
	The only thing you can't do with it is assert a copyright,
	since the author has done so.

  "Commercial rights reserved"
  "This program may not be sold nor included with any program which is
sold"
	Allows non-commercial distribution and use, but not sale
	for profit. Allows a media charge. There is some similar
	verbiage in the GNU copyright, but I think they just changed
	it.

  "This program may not be sold by any person for any price."
	This seems to prohibit media charges, too.

  "This program may be used by any person for any purpose as
  long as the copyright remains in place and the original
  author is credited."
	Credit where is due.

  "This program may only be distributed in unmodified form"
	Some variant of this is on the UNaXcess distribution, and
	several other useful programs.
================
  These are the ground rules as explained by a patent lawyer (yes I know
it's not the same thing):
	must have "Copyright 19xx by YOUR NAME"

	Restrictions are valid if they are "understandable by the
	average man."

	Unless you're rich, copyright doesn't mean much outside the US,
	due to the cost of locating/proving infringement.

Please let's not split hairs on these three guidelines, they are not the
sum of the copyright law, only guidelines.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me