Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!ka
From: ka@june.cs.washington.edu (Kenneth Almquist)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Copyrighting empty files (was Re: Must UNIX be a memory hog?)
Summary: AT&T has not copyrighted the empty file
Message-ID: <8335@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 24 May 89 05:36:51 GMT
References: <159@zebra.UUCP> <1608@auspex.auspex.com> <2@minya.UUCP> <20373@news.Think.COM>
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 15

It's about time that someone pointed out that the System V "true" program
is not the empty file.  The System V "true" program contains a copyright
notice.  An empty file can't contain a copyright or anything else.

AT&T could claim that an empty file infringed on its copyright of /bin/true
by asserting that the empty file was a derived work, but since the process
of converting the System V true program to the empty file involves deleting
every single line of text from the System V true program, I expect that a
court would rule that the empty file does not contain any points of
similarity to the AT&T true program, even if AT&T could prove that the
empty file was constructed using the command

	sed '1,$d' /bin/true > empty

Kenneth Almquist