*BSD News Article 3377


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,misc.legal.computing
Subject: Poisoned textbooks and net articles?
Message-ID: <7154@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 11 Aug 92 14:48:20 GMT
References: <1992Aug5.224337.6733@cirrus.com> <1992Aug10.225150.29474@unislc.uucp>
Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
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In article <1992Aug10.225150.29474@unislc.uucp> erc@unislc.uucp (Ed Carp) writes:
>              Of course, there are some folks out there
>that contend that if you release a piece of software to the net, you in
>effect place it in the public domain, but I don't believe a judge would buy
>that argument.

[Subject was: Re: AT&T sues BSDI & Our Retaliation -- but I don't
want to spread that whole discussion to misc.legal.computing.
Chose your followup destinations carefully.]

Well, just when _are_ we allowed to use information we read in books
or on the net?  And what's the point of reading these things if the
answer is "never"?  How much does copyright restrict us?  (Is there
any point in reading books, for instance?)

I'm not trying to disagree with you here -- I'd like to know the
answers to these questions, and I'm starting to worry about what
the answers might turn out to be.

A lot of people buy books in order to learn more about how to
write programs.  These books are copyrighted.  Do we have to
artificially skew our code so that we don't use exactly the
same technique we read about or what?

-- jd