[TUHS] copyright, was History of cal(1)?

[John Levine via TUHS]

It appears that Warner Losh via TUHS <imp at bsdimp.com> said:
>threw a lot of monkey wrenches into things. The 1980 Copyright act changed
>a lot of things. Prior to that, you could not copyright software *AT*ALL*.

I'm sorry, but that gets the history wrong.

The last major update to US copyright law was in 1976, with a minor update in
1980. We didn't join Berne until much later in 1989. While Berne affected a lot
of aspects of copyright, like whether works need a notice (not any more) or how
long it lasts (too long) it had no effect on software.

You are correct in that until the mid 1960s everyone assumed that software was
not eligible for copyright under the 1879 Baker vs. Selden decision that
accounting forms weren't eligible since they were just instructions about how to
do something. John Banzhaf registered the first software copyrights in 1964, to
test that assumption.  For a while it was unclear whether they were
enforcable. 

In 1974 Congress set up CONTU to study copyright issues, which were mostly
implemented in the 1976. There were a few left-overs addressed in 1980 which
added computer software to the list of things explicitly allowed, although
by then everyone had assumed it was implicitly included.

So anyway, if AT&T had wanted to use copyright to protect Unix in the 1970s they
could have.  I expect they chose trade secret because copyright lawsuits are
incredibly expensive and trade secret is a lot easier to enforce, at least if
the secrets haven't leaked.

R's,
John