Embed Notice

@Suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com I learned something new today. Apparently some early Research Unix versions from AT&T were originally published in the US, pre-Berne, AND with NO copyright notice. AT&T later tried to cover it up by adding them retroactively but it was exposed during the USL v. BSDi lawsuit. So it's likely that at least some ancient Unix code by AT&T is effectively public domain today.

But to make things even more confusing for everyone, later Unix included third-party code from many sources, including code from UCL, UNSW, and UCLA/BSD, which may still be copyrightable, but nobody clearly knows which is which anymore...

Apparently AT&T's lawyer couldn't decide whether software was copyrightable, for a while they added copyright notices and later they removed it (including third-party copyright notices!) and tried to use trade secret laws instead to enforce Unix's proprietary status (and by definition trade secret is not published), eventually they added copyright notices back again. This Unix mess was messier than I expected...