Xref: utzoo misc.legal:6074 news.software.b:1686 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: misc.legal,news.software.b Subject: Re: Copyright Law Revisited Message-ID: <4355@bsu-cs.UUCP> Date: 16 Oct 88 16:21:01 GMT References: <1930@vaxwaller.UUCP> <1988Oct13.173958.11367@utzoo.uucp> <1988Oct15.223607.26419@utzoo.uucp> Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) Followup-To: misc.legal Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 16 A side comment for those who distribute their work electronically: Copyright law does not say what bit pattern must be used to declare a copyright, only how that declaration must look to the human eye. As somebody pointed out long ago in another forum, one could always argue that the character sequence "(c)" was intended to be interpreted by the final output device as a c-in-a-circle. What we are transmitting is, after all, just a sequence of electronic signals, and what character representation they will eventually take depends entirely on whether the recipient speaks ASCII, EBCDIC, or some other language. One man's arbitrary character sequence might well be another man's c-in-a-circle, *and vice versa*. Follow-ups to misc.legal, please. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: !{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi