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I thought you couldn't 'copyright' something? I understood copyright to be something you had if you had created it.
by zwischenzug 6y ago
I thought you couldn't 'copyright' something?
I understood copyright to be something you had if you had created it.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoAh, brain cramp. I was thinking of patent, not copyright. Until State Street, nobody thought you could patent software, so nobody tried. Copyright... of the top of my head, I don't recall much about copyrightability of software.
- ghaff 6y agoThere was still controversy about software copyrightability in 1974. That said, I expect IBM still explicitly copyrighted their implementation of SQL (and licensed it [1]) as they had first started doing with some of the System/360 software during the prior decade. Note that, in 1974, you still had to explicitly copyright something; it didn't just happen automatically like today. [1] As a side note, IBM may not have been the first to license software but they certainly helped make it a standard practice. When they unbundled much of the System/360 software, they felt that copyright was a weak protection (given its uncertain legal status) so they combined it with a license.
- lloeki 6y ago> it didn't just happen automatically like today. ... in the US of A. Berne convention started a little bit over a full century before that. Impressive that the superfluous “need” for the Copyright (c) YYYY notice still persists to this day in the mind of many.
- ghaff 6y agoThere can still be advantages to being explicit as I understand it to enforce copyright/collect damages. For example, most people don't actually deposit copies in circumstances where they're technically supposed to.
- athms 6y agoPre-1976, authors had to explicitly add a copyright notice. The Copyright Act of 1976 changed all that. Creative works automatically gained copyright the moment it was created.