Re: Generation of permutations

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

tmoran@acm.org wrote in message news:<11Hz8.4180$PE6.2467133575@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>...
>   Before Wes beats it to Rio, I'd note:  "Registration with the United
> States Copyright Office is, however, required to bring a lawsuit to
> enforce your copyright." in The Software Developer's and Marketer's Legal
> Companion, c 1993.  Also "Registered works may be eligible for statutory
> damages and attorney's fees in successful litigation." at
> http://www.copyright.gov/faq.html#q14  So there's hope that it wasn't put
> on Simtel 17 years ago in the hope Doug Bryan could grab some easy money.
>   Maybe someone will e-mail all Simtel material authors suggesting they
> register, sue everyone who picks up the bait, and pay a finder's fee to
> the e-mailer, who will then get rich. ;)

Yes, of course you have to register the copyright to bring action. But
you
own the copyright without registration, and you just register to bring
the
action, happens all the time. In fact it is almost the norm to not
bother
to register until you need to take legal action. So the fact that
something
is not registered does not mean you can copy it with impunity. It is
true
that under some circumstances, failure to timely register can lose the
presumption of originality, but that only happens in a narrow set of
circumstances, and in any case only shifts the burden of proof, not
the
potential liability for the copyright violation.

People should learn to take copyright law more seriously in this
field.
Now that so much stuff floats around pretty freely on the net, anyone
downloading anything must put in some effort to ensure that they are
not
violating copyrights, or they take a risk. 

Yes, for personal use, a lot of people will take at face value a
license
agreement on a file that purports to give appropriate rights, and
that's
probably reasonable, but if you are doing serious work, you need to be
more careful.

And nothing can excuse this odd situation where party A writes some
software,
party B grabs it, slaps on a copyright notice and then claims to have
assigned to party C without any involvement of parties A or C.

By the way, a copyright notice that reads

copyrighted by X and the FSF

is almost certainly bogus. This is not the standard form of statement
on anything to which the FSF legitimately and actually holds copyright
interest.