Copyright

[J. Robert Sims]

If somebody writes a program to be freely distributed, and does not copyright
it, another person can then sell that program for a profit, and not even give
credit to the author. Another person might also get away with copyrighting the
program, and take all rights to distribution, etc. away from the original
author.

The "call me" type permissions gives the author a chance to make some money off
of a group that intends to use it for a purely commercial purpose. Writing
software and distributing it in the public domain is a great thing for
everyone; the whole network gets some really top notch software, and the
author receives recognition. If I start a company to sell TETRIS, and used
your program, without even giving you credit, wouldn't you be upset? If
anyone makes a profit from software, it should be the author. Companies do
pay attention to copyrights, and you would have legal recourse against those
few that didn't.

Many of the copyrights also state that the program may not be modified, or that
modifications must be clearly marked as such. I know that I would not want
to be blamed for someone else's defective modification to a program I wrote.
Many programs on this group can easily cause loss of memory, and possibly
damage hardware, especially the non-self contained programs. The disclaimer of
liability also serves as a warning to users of the program. I think that these
disclaimers are good to include, especially for the novice user encountering a
complicated program for the first time. If a novice user loses his memory
without being warned, he is likely to be quite upset, especially at the author.

The copyright messages really aren't that long. They may take a significant
amount of space in a newsletter, but you might get by with one set of notations
in the back and reference the appropriate type of copyright for each article.

The real solution, of course, is to shoot all the lawyers.

Rob

[Jeffrey R. Broido]

I wrote a program in '84 for IBM mainframes running MVS/XA. I included
copyright notices in the source and object code and sent it to a widely
distributed public domain software collection (CBT's MVS Mods
collection). My copyright noticed retained all rights except the right
was granted to freely use and distribute as long as it remained free (the
standard sort of thing). It was lifted by a large software house (Boole
and Babbage) and included in an expensive ($50,000 plus maintenance)
utility collection ("Resolve"). They removed my copyright notice and
substituted one of their own. I had never registered my copyright, but
still had some of my five years left and could have. I didn't act since
they have a large legal staff and was advised against taking the time and
bother, but I've been smarting over it ever since. I like best your last
idea. Jeff