Re: Asimov Site

[pausch@saafNOSPAM.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <39AB5396.EF6CEFF7@inetnebr.com>,
Roy and/or Janet Miller  <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
 
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
> 
> Paul, the Swedish expert in American law pontifficated:
> 
>> Perhaps you're not aware of that anything is copyrighted unless the
>> author explicitly says it's NOT copyrighted.....  So if you do
>> nothing about the copyright, it's by default copyrighted.  Not that
>> much trouble to do that, right?
> 
> Not according to a lawyer that I know. He said that you had to explicitly
> state that a document is copyrighted to have the protection. Otherwise, the
> document isn't copyrighted.
 
Perhaps the law is different for paper documents and for computer
software.  In the latter case there were lots of discussions on
Usenet a few years ago about the copyright law being changed such
that copyright was always implicit, i.e. you had to put an explicit
note there if you didn't want it to be copyrighted.
 
At that time I had some pieces of software (source code) which I had
released to the public domain.  They had no copyright notice of
course, but also no explicit note about it being PD.  So I was
contacted by several people, who asked me to add such a note so that
they could legally distribute it in freeware archives such as
http://www.snippets.org
 
-- 
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