Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!botter!star.cs.vu.nl!ast
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Minix SH Status. [Is Charles Forsyth around ??]
Message-ID: <811@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 21 Jun 88 21:35:04 GMT
References: <521@yunexus.UUCP>
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 27

In article <521@yunexus.UUCP> oz@yunexus.UUCP (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>This, I knew already. It is amusing however, that all the PD software
>people sent you when you requested it couple of years ago is all of
>a sudden distribution-restricted. Did they know this at the time ??

Some of that software was PD and some was copyright.    Where someone has 
copyright something, I have always asked explicit permission and have used
nothing for which permission was denied.  While it is true that the shell
may have originated in Canada, the heavy changes made at York would
constitute new grounds for copyrighting it, even if the original was PD.
All I was (and am) trying to do is protect Forsyth's rights.  He was nice
enough to let me use it, and I am not about to turn around and tell everyone
it is PD unless that is his opinion.  In the U.K., as in Canada and every
other country that has signed the Berne convention (essentially the entire
world minus the U.S. and China), a work is automatically copyrighted when it
is created.  No copyright notice is required.

As to P-H's "blanket copyright" if a work was originally public domain, then
it remains so, even if it is included in a copyrighted anthology like MINIX.
P-H's publication does not supersede any existing rights or take things out
of the public domain.  IEEE publishes many books of reprints, for example,
and their "global" copyright does not affect the "local" (non)copyrights of the
individual papers.  There is an Algol-like scope mechanism at work here.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)
-- 
Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)