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

["Joe Smith" <unknown_kev_cat@hotmail.com>]

"Lionel Elie Mamane" <lionel@mamane.lu> wrote in message 
[🔎] 20051007110125.GA16644@tofu.mamane.lu">news:[🔎] 20051007110125.GA16644@tofu.mamane.lu...
> On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 09:12:37AM +0000, 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?
>
> Clueless. It certainly isn't public domain. The author, whomever it
> is, is most probably not dead for 70 years; the programming language
> this is written in (whatever it is! (except maybe the one used by Ada
> Lovelace...)) didn't exist back then.

Before 1989 (in the US) lack of a copyright notice on an authorized 
publication could cause loss of copyright protection if the work was not 
registerd within 5 years, and all future versions be published with a 
correct notice. As the earliest known version has no copyright notice, was 
published in 1990 but with the implication that it had been previously 
published, and the fact that copyright registration of this work nearly 
trivial work is highly unlikely, there is a good chance that it is indeed in 
the public domain.