Questions on CURSES by Pavel Curtis 1982

[Stephen J. Friedl]

In article <522 at sbsvax.UUCP>, greim at sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) writes:
> [question on "PD" curses by Pavel Curtis]
> 
> My questions are
> 1.) Has the status of this software changed since 1982, i.e. is
> 	it still in the public domain?

Please be very careful here folks.

***************************************************************
******** "Public domain" means "absense of copyright" *********
***************************************************************

     Put another way, when you put your software in the public
domain, you are giving away >all< of your rights.  Once it is PD,
you cannot put restrictions on it ("commercial use prohibited",
"military use prohibited", "you gotta pay me", etc.).  Public
domain means you are really giving it away.

     If, on the other hand, you wish to retain your rights --
entirely reasonable -- it should be copyrighted.  "Copyright 1988
by me, permission granted for noncommercial use".  This is how
the FSF handles GNU: read the GNU docs -- "GNU is not in the
public domain".

     When we signed up for uunet, part of the netnews source
distribution included an excellent article by Jordan Breslow.  He
is an attorney practicing copyright law and computer law, and he
describes in pretty good detail all of the above plus more.  I'll
send a copy to anybody who asks; if there is enough interest
I'll post it.  It is very enlightening and entertaining reading.

     I wish the moderators of the various sources groups would
examine the PD/copyright status of their submissions and insure
that these terms are not used interchangeably.  I cringe when I
see (for example) the C Users Group have in their "Directory of
PD C source code" say

        "CUG cannot (and will not) distribute software that is
        not in the public domain. ...  When a disk is submitted
	with copyright notices, we try to identify them and
	include them on the outside of distribution disks."

     Maybe I'm just being picky, but it seems that it would
behoove us to find out and be safe.

     Steve

P.S.: I'm not a lawyer and I'm proud of it :-).

-- 
Steve Friedl     V-Systems, Inc. (714) 545-6442     3B2-kind-of-guy
friedl at vsi.com     {backbones}!vsi.com!friedl    attmail!vsi!friedl

Nancy Reagan on the Free Software Foundation : "Just say GNU"