lamy@cs.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy) (05/06/90)
Several implementations of *NIX include copyright notices in the login banner (for example:) IRIX System V Release 3.2 dixie.csri Copyright (c) 1988 Silicon Graphics, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Now this goes against my understanding of copyrights, since I would expect the copyright notice to appear in the work for which rights are being claimed. I could see why there would be copyright notices in the source or even near the top of distributed binary files. I could even see a copyright notice on every screen of a video game where the artistic expression of the game is what the rights are claimed for. But what could a copyright notice printed at the beginning of every login session ever be meant to protect? Curious about this curious practice, Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@cs.utoronto.ca, uunet!cs.utoronto.ca!lamy Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (05/08/90)
In article <90May6.125916edt.1496@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> lamy@cs.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy) writes: >Several implementations of *NIX include copyright notices in the login banner > IRIX System V Release 3.2 dixie.csri > Copyright (c) 1988 Silicon Graphics, Inc. > All Rights Reserved. >Now this goes against my understanding of copyrights, since I would expect the >copyright notice to appear in the work for which rights are being claimed. On the other hand, copyright notices are supposed to be visible near the front of an extended work, and burying them inside binary code would probably not qualify. Note that "(c)" gains nothing and might as well be omitted.