Larry Niven's Altair

On Thu, 20 Aug 2015, Paul Koning wrote: But, Were the BASICs published without notice??!? There are certainly plenty of copies with the notice removed, and/or copied without the notice, but was the original publication "without notice"? And, of course, "there was no notice physically on it by the time that I got it" is NOT the same as "published without notice", nor is unauthorized republication without the notice. "...assume xxx is in public domain by now" is assuming an inaccurate short term of copyright - if it was properly copyrighted after 1963, then copyright would not be expired yet. (I'm not aware of any BASICs published before 1963) So, the only hope for something published in the last half century to be public domain now would be if it were explicitly placed in public domain, or were originally published without notice before 1978. I found it amusing that for registration of copyright, I was originally advised to include source code, but was permitted to provide a hex dump, instead. (circle where the notice is in it) Note: registration is NOT required for copyright, but it makes action against infringers substantially easier, such as ones who try a defense such as a copy that had had notice removed. (do some sort of checksum of title page!) Even then, action can be a very expensive process if a letter won't suffice. I'm not sure, but I've heard that registration can even protect if there was accidental failure to include notice in publication. Paul and I don't agree about whether Typography counts as "creative" for a "derivative work". A less disputable example would be illustrations. But certainly, a derivative work does not remove the CONTENT (without the typography) from public domain. Thus, Project Gutenberg had some problems with distributing images scanned from modern publishers, but text OCR'd from them is back to the original public domain content.