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From: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: Permission
Message-ID: <2922@nsc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 30-Jun-85 17:19:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: nsc.2922
Posted: Sun Jun 30 17:19:09 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Jul-85 07:38:42 EDT
References: <570@usl.UUCP> <575@usl.UUCP>
Reply-To: chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Distribution: net
Organization: The Dreamer Fithp
Lines: 37
Summary: 

In article <575@usl.UUCP> jih@usl.UUCP (Juha I. Heinanen) writes:

>So, the question remains, did the machine James (I am using him here
>just as an example) developed his Emacs have a commercial Unix
>license.  If it didn't, James' copyright notice doesn't prevent
>anybody (including Richard) (re)distributing James' code in the
>form it was when it left the educational machine.  The same, of
>course, applies to any copyrighted code floating around in various
>universities.

Wrong. The copyright notices are correct regardless of whether or not Jim
broke AT&T's licensing. Copyright law is a different field from contract
law (or trade secret, for that matter). IF Gosling broke the license, it is
up to AT&T to do something about it; nobody else can because the
transgression was against them. In any case, the copyright would stand.

From what I can see, AT&T would have the following three options:

o cancel CMU's licenses.
o force CMU to upgrade the license to commercial and pay whatever fees 
  are required to do so.
o require Gosling to assign the copyright to them (he still has the
  copyright, but they control the distribution of the code). This would be
  similar to the cases in publishing where an author sells a story to a
  magazine and gives up specific rights.

In no case does the copyright become invalid. Don't make assumptions that
it will, or you could get yourself in trouble. 

chuq

-- 
:From the misfiring synapses of:                  Chuq Von Rospach
{cbosgd,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo}!nsc!chuqui   nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA

The offices were very nice, and the clients were only raping the land, and
then, of course, there was the money...