Re: Legal status of short, perhaps uncopyrightable program (fwd)

[Lewis Jardine <debian@catbox.co.uk>]

MJ Ray wrote:
> Asheesh Laroia <asheesh@asheesh.org> wrote:
> > There are some murmurings on the Web (e.g., 
> > http://www.spatula.net/software/sex/ , 
> > http://packages.gentoo.org/ebuilds/?sex-1.0 ) from people who believe that it 
> > is BSD-licensed, but in truth I have been able to find no license.
>
>
> http://www.spatula.net/software/sex/ says "Original author unknown.
> Presumably this is public domain by now." Anyone know why they
> presume that? If it has no copyright permission, isn't it all rights
> reserved? Can't escape copyright just because you're ignorant of who
> the author is.

Possibly they're thinking it was public-domained when the author posted 
the full source to usenet? Depending on the country it was posted from, 
might there be some form of implied license, similar to what happens to 
the copyrighted text of a mailing list post?

--
Lewis Jardine
IANAL, IANADD