Re: Legal (c) Copyright'ing..

[gudat@avalon.unizh.ch (gudat henrik)]

Victoria M Althoff (valthoff@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
: I believe that the Copyright Law provides copyright protection from the date 
: that the product is created.  Therefore, it is proper to go ahead and state 
: that your program is copyrighted, without bothering to go through the 
: registration process.  The only problem with this is that if you, as an author,

I think you're right. At least here there is no need (and also NO
place:-) ) to register your copy officially. There are some private
organizations, such as the "association of professional programmers" in
France that maintain archives of copyrighted programs. If you want to
accelerate legal things significantly in case of a copyright problem,
submitting your stuff is a great idea.

The only way to register your "idea" is to get a patent. Obviously you
need to have a very clever uidea in order to justify a patent.
Regardless of this fact, registering a patent or protecting a trade mark
cost a few bucks. (They raised the price here recently to about $400
plus regular payments).

For poor mans, though, just putting a "(C) <date>" on the label is
sufficient.


- henrik
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