Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!houpt
From: houpt@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Charles (Chuck) Houpt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Copyright status of Turing (and other languages)
Message-ID: <25549@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 26 Feb 89 21:51:25 GMT
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Reply-To: houpt@svax.cs.cornell.edu (Chuck Houpt)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 13


Is Turing under copyright or is it in the public domain?
More generally: How do programming languages fit into the
current intellectual property laws? Programming languages
don't seem to fit into any of the standard categories, such
as copyright or patent.
 
I know that Pascal is public domain because N. Wirth explicitly
said so. But what about other languages like C, Ada, Fortran etc?

Can anyone shed light on these questions?
-Chuck Houpt
 HOUPT@SVAX.CS.CORNELL.EDU