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From: z@masscomp.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: Re: Permission
Message-ID: <732@masscomp.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Jun-85 09:49:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: masscomp.732
Posted: Thu Jun 27 09:49:31 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Jun-85 02:01:29 EDT
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> 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.  This is provided that the earlier licenses said
> roughly the same thing.
> -- 
>                               Juha Heinanen

Not true.  There are several different issues here.  Let's assume for
the moment that Gosling did develop his Emacs on a machine with an
educational license.  (James, is this true?)  First of all, according to
the copyright law, he has an automatic copyright on anything he
develops, assuming it wasn't done as work for hire, which it apparently
wasn't.  As part of that copyright, he has the right to put copyright
notices on all his code, which he promptly did.  Neither of these steps
are in violation of the System V license; Berkeley did essentially the
same thing when it put all of its "Copyright 198? Regents of the
University of California" legends on much of its software.

Now, if Gosling developed his software on a machine licensed under the
terms you quoted, the University would be required to share Gosling's
code free of charge with others.  Whether or not it could compel Gosling
to do so would depend on what agreements Gosling had made with the
University.  In any case, Gosling's refusal to give unlimited
distribution to his code would be at most a violation of a civil
contract, and would therefore be a matter between him, the University,
and AT&T.  It would not affect the copyright protection granted to him
by federal law.  That is, other people might try to convince AT&T to
force CMU and/or Gosling to distribute his code, but if AT&T didn't want
to do that, Gosling's copyright protection would stand.  For example,
AT&T might decide that since the educational license terms had been
violated, it would force CMU to upgrade the license to a commercial one,
and not bother Gosling.  Regardless of what course of action AT&T took,
someone who copied Gosling's code without his permission would be in
violation of federal copyright law, even if Gosling and/or CMU were
found to be in violation of the AT&T license.

This is all from a legal standpoint, of course; I have not addressed the
moral question here.  Unfortunately, moral arguments usually don't get
you very far in court if you get sued.

My background in all of this is that during the development of my EMACS,
I had occasion to study the entire copyright law quite carefully, and I
also at one point retained an attorney whose specialty was copyright and
trade secret protection, and who had represented clients such as Data
General.  However, I am not a lawyer myself, and therefore cannot
present any of this as definitive legal advice.  For that, people must
go to their own lawyers.

On a related note, I recently received some mail from someone who did go
to the trouble of checking with his company's lawyer about GNU Emacs.  I
thought that people reading this newsgroup would be interested in what the
lawyer said.  The person sending me the message indicated that he didn't
want to get in the middle of this whole thing, so I've changed the names
to protect the innocent.  Here's the relevant part of his message:

	I actually did talk to our lawyer in charge of licensing and
	associated software stuff about GNU, described the situation and
	asked him what his opinion was. That was that we probably didn't
	want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. Unless RMS can come up
	with something that is legally binding (and electronic mail,
	which is easily forgeable, doesn't count) he won't let us add
	GNU to our [line of software] unless we can get a release from
	Gosling allowing us to. He doesn't buy the third hand
	redistribution, especially in light of [Gosling's] statements,
	and doesn't want us to expose ourselves to liability by
	distributing further. He more or less thinks that RMS is all
	wet.