Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.unix.bsd:3421 misc.legal.computing:1446 Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,misc.legal.computing Subject: Poisoned textbooks and net articles? Message-ID: <7154@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 11 Aug 92 14:48:20 GMT References: <1992Aug5.224337.6733@cirrus.com> <1992Aug10.225150.29474@unislc.uucp> Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 25 In article <1992Aug10.225150.29474@unislc.uucp> erc@unislc.uucp (Ed Carp) writes: > Of course, there are some folks out there >that contend that if you release a piece of software to the net, you in >effect place it in the public domain, but I don't believe a judge would buy >that argument. [Subject was: Re: AT&T sues BSDI & Our Retaliation -- but I don't want to spread that whole discussion to misc.legal.computing. Chose your followup destinations carefully.] Well, just when _are_ we allowed to use information we read in books or on the net? And what's the point of reading these things if the answer is "never"? How much does copyright restrict us? (Is there any point in reading books, for instance?) I'm not trying to disagree with you here -- I'd like to know the answers to these questions, and I'm starting to worry about what the answers might turn out to be. A lot of people buy books in order to learn more about how to write programs. These books are copyrighted. Do we have to artificially skew our code so that we don't use exactly the same technique we read about or what? -- jd