andrew@orca.UUCP (Andrew Klossner) (12/06/84)
[]
"All the semi-official stuff I have seen from AT&T say that
"UNIX is an unregistered trademark of AT&T..." . What exactly
do they mean by "unregistered"? I have seen several times the
statement that it is inappropriate to use the (T) symbol in
connection with "UNIX" and yet I have seen AT&T ads which use
this symbol.
"Does the fact that "UNIX" is "unregistered" mean "well guys,
we'd really appreciate it if you don't use this word
inappropriately, but we havn't registered it so we can't really
do a thing about it ..." or does "unregistered" have some
obscure meaning to American lawyers."
In the U.S., you get trademark protection by simply using the trademark
on a product; you don't have to register it. Registered trademarks are
followed by a superscript letter 'R' in a circle, and unregistered
trademarks are followed by superscript letters 'TM', not in a circle.
To register a trademark, you pay a fee and file it with an bureau in
Washington D.C.; this affords you a more solid claim if you ever have
to go to court over a trademark violation. This is usually only done
by companies with enough legal resources to file such a suit, but that
certainly would include AT&T.
I'm just guessing now, but I speculate that the trademark might
originally have gone unregistered because AT&T, a legal monopoly, was
forbidden by law to offer non-telecommunications products in the
market. And perhaps there's some legal problem with registering a
widely-used unregistered trademark.
"Surely a name must be registered before it can be subject to
international copyright agreements (I live in Australia)."
In the U.S., trademark protection is completely independent from
copyright protection. And, in fact, the AT&T Unix(tm) brand operating
system is not protected by copyright in the U.S.; trade secret
protection is used instead.
-- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!orca!andrew) [UUCP]
(orca!andrew.tektronix@csnet-relay) [ARPA]henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/09/84)
> I do not fully understand how AT&T is able to hold nearly all UN*X systems > as a trade secret. Is there some kind of a limit on how wide spread > their 'trade secret' can be extended? Is there some method which > a trade secret becomes so widely known that it is no longer secret? > (much like a trademark can become public domain via too much generic use) A trade secret becomes unsecret only if the secrecy is broken. That is, if the secret becomes widely known to people who have *not* formally agreed to keep it quiet. This happens if AT&T gets sloppy about protecting it (in which case they aren't treating it as a secret, and their protection vanishes), or if somebody who has formally committed himself to keeping it quiet (i.e., by signing a Unix licence) spills the beans. In the latter case, the man who spills a secret he has agreed to keep secret is going to get sued for his shirt. So is the man he spills it to, if said recipient should have known it was secret. If AT&T catches it quickly -- and they are indeed on the alert for such breaches of secrecy -- they may well be able to contain the leak. If they can't, the secret isn't a secret any more. However, so long as the secret is protected properly, by things like non-disclosure agreements, there is no limit on how widely it can be used while still remaining legally a trade secret. > How is AT&T able to claim trade secret over something like 4.2BSD? Easy. It's derived from Bell code. And Berkeley, like all of us, has signed a non-disclosure agreement that requires keeping the Bell code secret. So long as there is one byte of Bell code in x.yBSD, it is still covered, and if Berkeley wants to distribute it, they have to be careful to do so only to people who are authorized to see the Bell parts. > If you diff 4.2BSD source with V.2 source, you will find that > a great deal of the code is not the same. Also BSD got major > funding via DARPA, who is in turn funded by US tax payers. > Is there some point where the long arm of trade secret breaks? > Does who did the work and paid for it impact the status of another > person's trade secret claim? If you start out with a trade secret > code and hack it up one side and down the other while the original > code goes off in another direction, can you claim your own trade secret? It doesn't matter that some of it is different; what matters is that some of it is still the same. Another thing that matters is that the Berkeley work is based on knowledge obtained by studying the secret material, although *this* is a very slippery area. Who else contributed to the development of x.yBSD is irrelevant; DARPA has no power to declare AT&T's trade-secret protection invalid. They could impose *additional* restrictions if they wanted to and could clear it with their superior authorities, but they can't arbitrarily disregard software agreements they signed to get Unix. Similarly, you can claim your own trade secret protection for mods you make to x.yBSD or System N, but this does not eliminate the trade-secret protection AT&T has made you agree to as a condition of giving you the stuff. If you rewrote the stuff from scratch, in a distinctly different way (so you weren't just reconstructing the Bell stuff from memory), *then* AT&T has no claim on you. This is what the Mark Williams folks did. But they were careful: the innards of their system are not at all similar to the Unix kernel, and they did not have access to Unix source while they were developing it. (Having access to the source doesn't prove that you looked at it, but it makes it a whole lot harder to prove that you *didn't* if AT&T sues you for copying their secret.) [Warning: I am not a lawyer. For heaven's sake, consult a specialist before doing anything rash! I disclaim all responsibility...] -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
chongo@nsc.uucp (12/09/84)
In article <1213@orca.UUCP> andrew@orca.UUCP (Andrew Klossner) writes: >In the U.S., trademark protection is completely independent from >copyright protection. And, in fact, the AT&T Un*x (ed: name modified) >system is not protected by copyright in the U.S.; trade secret >protection is used instead. Perhaps someone could explain some things I don't understand: I do not fully understand how AT&T is able to hold nearly all UN*X systems as a trade secret. Is there some kind of a limit on how wide spread their 'trade secret' can be extended? Is there some method which a trade secret becomes so widely known that it is no longer secret? (much like a trademark can become public domain via too much generic use) How is AT&T able to claim trade secret over something like 4.2BSD? Save your flames about it being based on early Bell Labs systems, and save your flames about how any AT&T people who may have helped out, and save your flames about the legal papers under which BSD was started. If you diff 4.2BSD source with V.2 source, you will find that a great deal of the code is not the same. Also BSD got major funding via DARPA, who is in turn funded by US tax payers. Is there some point where the long arm of trade secret breaks? Does who did the work and paid for it impact the status of another person's trade secret claim? If you start out with a trade secret code and hack it up one side and down the other while the original code goes off in another direction, can you claim your own trade secret? Disclaimer: The above are my own questions and comments and do not reflect a stand of the company I work for. chongo <UN*X is a secret kept by tens of thousands of people, at least> /\??/\ -- "Don't blame me, I voted for Mondale!" John Alton 85'
gwyn@BRL-TGR.ARPA (12/09/84)
If you have access to source code for ANY version of UNIX, you are supposed to be bound by your site's license agreement with AT&T. That is what keeps UNIX a trade secret. Certainly, UCB can add their own restrictions for their enhancements ON TOP of AT&T's. For a UNIX look-alike to be free of AT&T ownership, it would have to be developed entirely from publicly available information. Although this covers a lot of ground, that is still so much work that only a few vendors offer such systems, and they are hard put to track newer developments of the "official" UNIX product.
ron@BRL-TGR.ARPA (12/10/84)
Yes, and I know of only to Non-AT&T based UNIX-likes around. One is Idris from Whitesmiths which had everything except ptrace, but I don't think the demand is that high (it was done back when Binary licenses and OEM sublicenses did not exist) anymore. The other is GNU by Robert Stallman (programmer to the people) which he is attempting to do so that computer users of the world can be free of AT&T's capitalistic tyranny. -Ron The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Denelcor.
gwyn@BRL-TGR.ARPA (12/10/84)
In addition to Idris and Gnu (is it available yet?), I believe that UNOS and/or whatever Mark Williams Co. purveys are UNIX lookalikes not derived from AT&T code. I could be mistaken..
chongo@nsc.UUCP (Landon C. Noll) (12/10/84)
In article <6482@brl-tgr.ARPA> ron%BRL-TGR@tgr.UUCP writes: > ... The other is GNU by Robert >Stallman (programmer to the people) which he is attempting to do so that >computer users of the world can be free of AT&T's capitalistic tyranny. No doubt AT&T will try to file anti-trust against the general public, should GNU become wide spread enough to become `THE STANDARD'. :-) BTW, it seems that GNU is something being talked about on the ARPA side more than the Usenet side. Is there a sizeable group of Usenet people involved? Too bad there is not a net.unix.gnu newsgroup for Usenet folks. Arpa mailing lists dont always get here. What is the status of GNU anyway? What has been written and test so far, and for which machines? chongo <GNU is not a trademark of AT&T> /\$$/\ -- "Don't blame me, I voted for Mondale!" John Alton 85'
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/11/84)
> ... The other ["Non-AT&T based UNIX-like"] is GNU by Robert > Stallman (programmer to the people) which he is attempting to do so that > computer users of the world can be free of AT&T's capitalistic tyranny. Actually, the thing that most struck me about GNU was that Stallman had such a long list of "improvements" he wanted to make that the result was most unlikely to resemble Unix very much. Kiss portability goodbye... -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
eager@amd.UUCP (Mike Eager) (12/14/84)
> Yes, and I know of only to Non-AT&T based UNIX-likes around. One is > Idris from Whitesmiths which had everything except ptrace, but I don't > think the demand is that high (it was done back when Binary licenses and > OEM sublicenses did not exist) anymore. The other is GNU by Robert > Stallman (programmer to the people) which he is attempting to do so that > computer users of the world can be free of AT&T's capitalistic tyranny. > > -Ron > > The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Denelcor. Let's not forget Coherent. -- Mike Eager (amd!eager)
eager@amd.UUCP (Mike Eager) (12/20/84)
> How is AT&T able to claim trade secret over something like 4.2BSD? > If you diff 4.2BSD source with V.2 source, you will find that > a great deal of the code is not the same. [As long as there are multiple postings to the net, I might as well add my comments, too!] I'm not privy to what the people at Berkeley or ATT are doing with unix, but I can offer one comment about the differences. I added the VPATH feature of System V make to the 4.2BSD make. As part of investigating how VPATH (which seems to be undocumented) works, I diff'd the two versions of make. Wow, what a mess! Everything changed! Complete rewrite! Well, I looked closer. Yes it is mostly a re-write, but for reasons I could not fathom. The routine names are the same, as are most of the variables. The packaging into files is a little different. The formatting of the source is quite different. Where one uses explicit structure references, the other uses a typedef which references the structure. In sum, they both work in the identical same fashion, and one is clearly the copy of the other, but they are not identical. It seems that they were made different for various philosophical and esoteric reasons, which makes it difficult to relate a fix for one to the other. If there were trade secret protection in one, the process of reformatting the code does not remove the trade secret protection in the other. I wonder how much the two versions really differ, and how much the differences are just a facade. [It is irrelevant to the trade secret question -- if trade secrets were used in the development of a product, the owner of the trade secret has valid claim to protection of the derived product. You have to take public info (Vol. 1 & 2)and do a complete rewrite, without looking at the protected source. Like was done for Coherent.] -- Mike Eager (amd!eager)