[LAD] students and copyright

Gene Heskett gene.heskett at verizon.net
Sun Aug 2 15:58:36 UTC 2009


On Sunday 02 August 2009, Dave Phillips wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>Just out of curiosity, how many participants in this discussion are
>copyright holders ? How many of you have published works under copyright ?
>
>Best,
>
>dp
>
Everything I ever wrote with 3 exceptions, carried a copyright (date) Maurice 
E. Heskett.

The first 2 exceptions are anything I wrote for the trs-80 color computer, 
which I long ago placed in the public domain, some of which is 10 to 20 years 
later, on hardware installation disks from at least one src yet today.  And 
anything I've written for linux has been GPLv2 only since 11 years ago.

The other exception was a control program that was very useful to tv stations 
doing their own commercial production, and the target machine was quite 
cramped for memory, so it was only in the srcs.

How proud one can be about his output is best stated by the longevity of that 
output, several of my projects for the 'coco' are now 20 years old & still in 
use, and 2 programs I wrote for television stations have enjoyed lifetimes of 
over a decade.  Distribution of those however, wasn't an issue, AFAIK, only 
one copy of each of those ever existed, they were written, and the hardware 
needed built, to address a specific need.  I do know that the mention of my 
device and program while at their booth at the NAB in 1981, caused MicroTime 
to drop a project they were working on which was not as capable in the model 
they had there.  Why they didn't just come and ask, I'll never know.

As for the removal of the names of the earlier contributors to the software 
that started this bit of an endless and sometimes smoking thread, I would hope 
that there exists in writing, a letter available to Mr. Keller, allowing their 
copyrights to be removed, or that their contributions have all been re-written 
in a clean room environment, with the re-writers never having had access to 
the original code.  If a code contribution has been completely removed, only 
then can the copyright notice also be removed.

This last option is well established practice and seems to have stood the test 
of legal time.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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