Silly copyright?

[Jean-Francois Lamy]

Several implementations of *NIX include copyright notices in the login banner
(for example:)

	IRIX System V Release 3.2 dixie.csri
	Copyright (c) 1988 Silicon Graphics, Inc.
	All Rights Reserved.

Now this goes against my understanding of copyrights, since I would expect the
copyright notice to appear in the work for which rights are being claimed.  I
could see why there would be copyright notices in the source or even near the
top of distributed binary files.  I could even see a copyright notice on every
screen of a video game where the artistic expression of the game is what the
rights are claimed for.  But what could a copyright notice printed at the
beginning of every login session ever be meant to protect?

Curious about this curious practice,

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy at cs.utoronto.ca, uunet!cs.utoronto.ca!lamy
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4