Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!indri!polyslo!usc!pollux.usc.edu!papa
From: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: PD Disks
Keywords: PD Disks, Money
Message-ID: <16698@usc.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 89 22:55:39 GMT
References: <38833@bbn.COM> <99856@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <38944@bbn.COM> <6886@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> <8687@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@usc.edu
Reply-To: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Organization: Felsina Software, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 23

In article <8687@polya.Stanford.EDU> gilham@polya.Stanford.EDU (Fred Gilham) writes:
>By the way, I often see things like "This software is public domain except
>it cannot be sold for profit", with or without an accompanying copyright
>notice.  Is this legally meaningful?

No, it is a contradiction in terms.  By definition, public domain software
CAN be sold for profit. ANY profit.  Including the above notice, without the
copyright notice, is equivalent to relinquishing ALL rights to the software
in question.  The courts have maintained that the copyright holder HAS to
do appropriate actions to make sure that the item (software/firmware) does not
go into the public domain. The same is true for trademarks (which should
appropriately be marked TM).  BAYER lost the Aspirin trademark. XEROX hasn't
yet, since it is trying VERY HARD to disallow the uses of "xeroxing" as
a verb. Intel lost the copyright on some of the chips it licensed to
NEC, because it failed to put the appropriate copyright notice on the
chips.  Lesson to learn: put the appropriate legal copyright notice if
you want to keep your rights.

-- Marco Papa 'Doc'
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