Xhash - choke cough gasp wheeze

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

  (Note the cross-post and Followup-To.  If we're going to discuss
copyrights yet again, then misc.legal is the right place to do it, not
alt.sources.d.  The people in the misc.legal newsgroup are probably,
on the average, more capable of speaking on this issue from the point
of view of someone who actually knows the laws.)

In article <1991Apr22.063901.20792 at noose.ecn.purdue.edu> dev at ei.ecn.purdue.edu (Larry Weeks) writes:
   Actually, isn't all code automatically copyrighted, under the latest
   revisions to the Federal copyright lows?

  Please remember that Federal copyright laws are not the whole show.
International copyright law also needs to be taken into consideration
in some situations.  I believe that in the case of "(C)" vs.
"Copyright" or "c-in-a-circle" is one such situation -- if I recall
correctly from the last time this was discussed, (C) is enough to
ensure copyright in the USA, but not enough to ensure it under
International copyright law.

   I was under the impression
   that unless you implicitly place it in the public domain, you have a
   legal case for ownership should you wish to pursue it...

  There are situations where you implicitly grant the right to freely
redistribute, and you can't then go back and later ask people to pay
for what they got while the code was freely redistributable.

  For example, if you post code to the Usenet, with no copyright
notice, you are almost certainly not going to be able to win if you
ever decide that the code was copyrighted and try to collect on it.  A
case where you put a copyright notice in, but the copyright notice is
invalid (e.g. no "Copyright" or "c-i-a-circle"), is less clear, but
there is still some room for you to lose if you ever go to court.

Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
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