Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> wrote:

 On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 14:15, Clem Cole wrote:
 Copyright *protection* is automatic ??? as soon as the code is written it
 is
 considered protected.  Copyright *registration* is just a formality
 necessary to instigate litigation.  There is no time limit for
 registration.

 That's true today, but to my understanding wasn't true in 1988. (Well,
 registration wasn't a requirement to be copyrighted - that requirement
 went away retroactively in 1978, and only applied to unpublished works
 then.) The change seems to have been March 1, 1989 from what I can find.

From what I have in mind, there have been changes from around 1992 from the 
Berne convention. Before, US code (even when it was copyrighted) was not 
protected in Europe.

I know that in former times, code was only copyrighted in the USA in case a 
sample had been given to a governmental site. I thought this changed together 
with the Berne convention....

Given that the AT&T code that was used by BSD does not have a copyright notice, 
it seems to be obvious that it was not copyrighted as AT&T did not give a 
sample to the government.

So the question was whether there was a copyright problem with the fact that 
BSD included the code. The fact that AT&T did give away their code did exhaust 
the right to prevent distribution.

BSD on the other side did bundle the right to distribute with the condition 
that the license notice must not be removed and that distributors need to 
announce that they include software developed at BSD.

AT&T removed this notice and did not announce the porevenance.

This is why BSD finally won...

Jörg