Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!ditka!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: status of LZHUF.C
Message-ID: <1351@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 16 Apr 89 02:35:36 GMT
References: <12484344706045@MATHOM.CISCO.COM>
Reply-To: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Organization: Rick's Home Grown Unix; Portland, OR
Lines: 26

In article <12484344706045@MATHOM.CISCO.COM> BILLW@MATHOM.CISCO.COM (William Westfield) writes:
<What is the status of lzhuf.c ?  The code does not contain any
<copyright notice, but it doesn't contain anything saying that it
<is public domain either.  Would it be OK to write comercial software
<using the compression/decompression code from lzhuf.c?

As of April 1st, US law no longer *requires* a copyright notice to be
present to obtain full protection. This brings our laws more or less
into line with the rest of the world. 

So unless there is a specific notice placing the code in the public
domain, it *must* be assumed to befully protected by copyright. In fact
there is a message that apparently hasn't arrived at your site yet,
that clarifies the copyright of the code in question and it isn't
usable commercially...

But the point I want everyone to get is that the default condition is
now "It's copyrighted" rather than "It's public domain". This change in
the law means that we are going to have to remember to *explicitly* 
place things in the public domain if that's where we want them.

-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short