[TUHS] History of cal(1)?

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

>>  >
>>
>>  It's worse than that. The US joined the Berne Convention in 1980, which
>>  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*.
>>  This is why Unix was done via Trade Secret: they couldn't copyright the
>>  software.
>
This is untrue.   First, the US didn’t join the Berne Convention until 
1989.
Second, software copyright existed in the US well before Berne.    Much 
analogy was made to piano rolls which were decided well back in 1908,
Software was generally held to be the same sort of literary work that 
anything else was including these piano rolls and phonograph records.
There’s tons of pre-Berne case law on this, Notably Apple v. Franklin, 
and Williams Elec v. Artic Intl.   Both affirm that both the source code 
and the compiled code on computers is protectable.

There were a number of reasons why Western Electric used Trade Secret 
rather than copyright.   Some of it was due to the nature of Bell Labs.
Other, is that when your protecting TECHNOLOGIC INFORMATION, trade 
secret allows you to stop that dissemination.   Copyright, only 
prohibits making copies, but not dissemination of the information and 
patents by their very nature require the information to be disclosed.

-Ron