yacc: public domain?

[Geoff Kuenning]

In article <1276 at orca.UUCP> andrew at orca.UUCP (Andrew Klossner) writes:

>>	"I have heard the claim (and it makes sense to me) that SOURCE
>>	code put out by yacc is proprietary, since it contains
>>	/usr/lib/yaccpar.
>
>In 1982, it was the official legal position of AT&T that object code
>from yacc is proprietary.

Mind you, I'm not volunteering to be a test case, but my layman's legal
opinion is that AT&T cannot claim ownership of yaccpar, /usr/include/*,
/bin/lint and /bin/spell, and anything else that you can 'cat' at will.

My reasoning is as follows:

    (1) AT&T has traditionally used trade secret law to protect UNIX.  All
	UNIX licenses include a requirement that anyone given access to
	the source of UNIX sign a nondisclosure agreement.
    (2) AT&T has never tried to claim a copyright on the source code of
	UNIX.  This is keeping with the best legal advice of the late 70's,
	which said that copyrighting involved publishing which is antithetical
	to keeping something secret.  There are copyrights on AT&T's *printed*
	documentation, but there are none in the source code.  Nor are there
	any in /usr/lib/yaccpar (I just looked).  My /usr/include stuff has
	copyrights from UniSoft, but none from AT&T.  Since all of this stuff
	has been around for over 1 year, I conclude that it is now in the
	public domain (from a copyright point of view).
    (3) Since /usr/lib/yaccpar is not copyrighted and is not patented, AT&T's
	only legal protection is trade secret law.  But the most basic
	element of that law is that the information must be kept *secret* by
	restrictions and contractual agreements.  Over the years, thousands of
	unprivileged users have been given unrestricted access to /usr/include
	and all other cat-able files.  So where is the secret?

Thus, AT&T would seem to have no legal recourse against people who use
publicly-readable files.  

In fact, trade secret law doesn't prohibit reverse engineering, either.  I
have seen a lot of recent contracts that explicitly prohibit disassembling the
code involved.  Since at least the older AT&T contracts do not cover this
possibility, it is probably also legal to disassemble any binary that has
world read permissions unless you are covered by a more recent contract.

This is not to be construed as advice to go blithely stealing AT&T code just
because it's in /usr/include.  I would at least check with a real lawyer
first.  But I am eagerly awaiting the first test case.
-- 

	Geoff Kuenning
	...!ihnp4!trwrb!desint!geoff