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

[steve jenkin via TUHS]

> On 21 Sep 2025, at 11:06, John Levine via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> 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

For those playing along at home, this is a good history.

The AT&T legal department may not have wanted to ‘deposit’ the source code.

Chapter 2: Copyright of Computer Programs
	<https://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise17.html>

According to the Copyright Office, the first deposit of a computer program for registration was on November 30, 1961. 
North American Aviation submitted a tape containing a computer program. 
While the Copyright Office was trying to determine whether such a deposit could be registered, 
two short computer programs were submitted by a Columbia University law student to determine how a computer program might be registered. 

One computer program was submitted as a printout published in the Columbia Law School News on April 20, 1964, 
while the other was on magnetic tape. 
The copyrights for both student computer programs were registered in May 1964, 
and North American Aviation’s computer program was registered in June 1964.

[Author's note: It's been brought to my attention that there were at least three computer programs registered before the ones mentioned above. 
The first of those was a FORTRAN program entitled "Gaze-2, A One-Dimensional, Multigroup, Neutron Diffusion Theory Code for the IBM-7090," written by the General Atomic Division of General Dynamics, registered on February 1, 1963 (registration number A607663).
In early 1964, General Dynamics registered two other computer programs (A677198 and A678350).]

Surprisingly, the Copyright Office did not seem to think that the Supreme Court’s White-Smith v. Apollo decision prevented the copyrighting of computer programs.

It believed that punched cards, a primary medium for computer programs at the time, 
could be read by somebody familiar with the code used to represent characters on the cards, 
or could be printed to get a computer program listing intelligible to a person. 

Magnetic tapes, presumably, were just like a whole bunch of punch cards on a more convenient medium.

--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin