reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (01/28/86)
In the past few days I have been in contact with several people at the US Copyright office, and I have read every word of Circular R1, their publication called "the Nuts and Bolts of copyright", and I have listened patiently to a law professor at Stanford explain the issue as only professors can. My conclusions are these: * My original statement is true, that things posted to USENET do not become public domain, even if they are posted without copyright notice. * That law is not blessed with simple "decision procedures", and resorts to trials to determine the truth or falseness of things about which reasonable people disagree. * That it is very difficult to prove a copyright infringement case in court if there was no copyright notice on the material. * That lawyers tend to take the pragmatic view, rather than the mathematical view, of copyright: if you can't prove it in court, it isn't true. The summary truth, rephrased by me, is this: that if you post something to USENET without a copyright notice it is not public domain; it is copyrighted and you own the copyright. However, since it is unlikely that you would be able to win an infringement suit with such slim evidence, the material might as well be in the public domain, since you have no protection by any mechanism other than the conscience of the infringer. Therefore from the point of view of a lawyer the material is effectively public domain, even though it is in fact protected by copyright. -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA