Old Software rights (was content rights)

Dan> In an unrelated topic, Dan> I have a bunch of old programs from my University days, back in Dan> the late 70's, early 80's all Vax/VMS code, in various Dan> languages, etc. Dan> In those days we never put "(C)" or copyright notices on code. Dan> I'm just wondering if it's generally "ok" to release this code Dan> to the public? First of all, IANAL. So apply salt to what follows. There's a lot of good stuff in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law It depends on the date. It used to be the case that a "work" published without copyright notice was in the public domain. That is no longer true. Also, I'm pretty sure the rules are different for unpublished works. Some early commercial software products tripped over this -- CDC's COS and IBM OS/360 apparently are examples of public domain works. Dan> It's been 30 some years (longer than copyright would apply Dan> anyhow). I have searched for 20 years for some of the authors Dan> and never found anyone. Copyright these days is a LOT longer than 30 years. And even back in the 1940s, it was 28 years initially plus another 28 years if renewed (and if the copyright was still in effect in 1976 then the new long terms would into play, if I understood right) -- so if you have a copyrighted work from 1940, it's in the public domain today if it wasn't renewed, but it's still copyrighted if it WAS renewed. Dan> But another age old question, who has rights to code developed Dan> on the universities equipment? I know it's a common question Dan> these days, but "back in the day" such considerations never Dan> occurred, it was a different era. If the author was an employee, it would be "work for hire" and belong to the employer. Otherwise, it would belong to the author. For example, if you wrote it as a student for a class (as opposed to writing it as a research assistant in exchange for a pay check) it's your property, not the university's. That assumes there wasn't some explicit contract in effect assigning copyright to the university. (That happened occasionally; I remember the University of Illinois did this with PLATO -- but not in any other area that I ran into.) Dan> Everyone from that era has also vanished with the wind, I know, Dan> I've looked. Dan> So is it fairly safely abandoned? Another way to look at it - Dan> If it was your code, some small silly thing you wrote, would you Dan> care? Almost certainly not. But I find it's worth working hard to ask; people are often very willing to say yes, but if blind-sided by someone publishing their work without asking first will get annoyed. (That's particularly true if the publication is without correct credit; it sounds to me like you're careful to avoid that mistake...) paul