Copyrighting empty files (was Re: Must UNIX be a memory hog?)

[Kenneth Almquist]

It's about time that someone pointed out that the System V "true" program
is not the empty file.  The System V "true" program contains a copyright
notice.  An empty file can't contain a copyright or anything else.

AT&T could claim that an empty file infringed on its copyright of /bin/true
by asserting that the empty file was a derived work, but since the process
of converting the System V true program to the empty file involves deleting
every single line of text from the System V true program, I expect that a
court would rule that the empty file does not contain any points of
similarity to the AT&T true program, even if AT&T could prove that the
empty file was constructed using the command

	sed '1,$d' /bin/true > empty

Kenneth Almquist