Vintage Software Copyright

[Rod Smallwood]

It also brings up another issue.  When they did finally get some legal 
stuff into place (circa 1988 over here) was it retrospective.?
If not then by definition anything prior is not  protected and my be 
freely distributed.
Rod


On 21/08/2015 22:34, Fred Cisin wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Aug 2015, Rod Smallwood wrote:
>> And...
>>       We have a new question. What would have been the first piece of 
>> copyrightable software?
>
> Combined with the issue that many lawyers and judges did not consider 
> software to BE copyrightable.
>
> And then, there was a general consensus that the code was 
> copyrightable, but not the performance.  You could legally create your 
> own Puckman program, so long as you didn't use any of their code.  
> That led to projects such as Adam Osborne's Paperback Software, which 
> did clean-room writing of duplicates of popular software.  Until Lotus 
> stomped him.
> That led to Look&Stink protection, sometimes extending to the sequence 
> and names of the choices in a normal "Files" menu.
>
> At the time, if Adam were to have been a few months earlier in 
> acquiring any of the rubble of VisiCorp, it could have been all over!
> Delrina was not upheld on their "parody" defense of Opus & Bill 
> shooting flying toasters, in which the "victim" was an infringer of an 
> album cover.
> Consider Xerox in the Windoze/Mac copyright battle!
> Many have always considered fundamental concepts to not be copyrightable.
> Where would MICROS~1 be if Gary Kildall were to have been litigious?
> (Novell's acquisition of DRI was solely for the IP rights, as a "Get 
> Out Of Jail Free" card against any Microsoft attack)
>
>
>