john@moncol.UUCP (John Ruschmeyer) (01/08/85)
>From: dee@cca.UUCP (Donald Eastlake) > >Under the new US Copyright law, a copyright notice is not defective if >it gives a year one year in the future from the actual year of >publication. However, the term of the copyright runs from the actual >year of publication. There is also no problem if the year is correct or >is earlier than the actual year of publication. If the year given is >more than one year after the actual year of publication, it is as if no >notice were put on the book. However, there are number of circumstances >under which omission of notice is not fatal so you still can't tell if >its completely in the public domain. > The above reminds me of a quote from Adams' book _The Restuarant at the End of the Universe_. In a passage about some statistics in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", he writes: "...the simplistic style in which they are written is partly explained by the fact that the editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few footnotes in order to avoid persecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous Galactic Copyright laws. "It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backward in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws." -- John Ruschmeyer ...!vax135!petsd!moncol!john Monmouth College W. Long Branch, NJ 07764 Kirk: You ought to sell a manual of instructions with these things. Cyrano: If I did, Captain... what would happen to the search for knowledge?