Adding copyright notices to every source code file is reasonable because it costs next to nothing. Figuring out what is copyrightable, on the other hand, is expensive, because it requires lawyers, and a waste of time because lawyers' answers are always "it depends". You never actually know how enforceable your copyright claim is until you actually litigate, which is REALLY expensive.
> a waste of time because lawyers' answers are always "it depends".
Sorry for the little OT rant, but I'll have to object to that. That's IMO less of a lawyer thing, and more a "asking a field expert a generic question and expecting an immediate, brief answer" kind of thing.
In my experience, if you straight up ask any field expert, be it a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, etc... a vague, but obviously case specific question, the real experts will rather try to point out that they lack necessary background information and that the underlying subject matter is not that simple ("It depends", "I'd have to look into this", "Well uhmmm, possibly/maybe/yes/kind of, but...", "It's not that simple").
If you're not particularly familiar with some subject matter, it is kind of hard to gauge that the "simple question" might be very vague, maybe confuse some subject matter and might be edging on a very complex topic.
I take it most people here have some sort of programming background? Just try to remember the last family gathering where someone started pestering you about their computer problems, or tried to start small talk about something they picked up in the headlines. Or maybe a meeting with management where you were asked a "but couldn't you just [simply]...." kind of question (or even worse: "exactly how long will this take?") and they tried to press you for a swift, immediate answer.
From my experience so far, I'd even go further and suggest to be skeptical of any "expert" who has a habit of confidently answering briefly and to the point.
You're right. I am a lawyer, so you'd think I'd be more careful. I should have written "lawyers' answers are usually 'it depends'". You know, because it depends.
Copyright notices are useful the same way written contracts are: you legally do not need a notice (written contract) to establish copyright protection (enter into a contract), but if a dispute arises it helps establish the fact that the user was notified (the other party agreed to this contract).
Yeah this is funny, but it's not stupid. It's also a lot simpler to have a company policy that says "every code file should have this boilerplate at the top of it" than to try to specify exactly what does and doesn't. You could even check for this in your CI pipeline, to avoid wasting time debating it in code review.
To expand on that idea, purely functional expressions are not copyrightable in the first place. How and when software becomes copyrightable is undefined in law.
My company doesn't require this, but I also don't understand in any way how adding copyright boilerplate to each source file has anything to do with the writer's integrity. Are the people in the GNU foundation lacking in integrity, since they have this policy?
> So if you use blank lines in any of your files, you are in blatant violation of AT&T's copyright claim
Independent derivation of a work is defense against copyright infringement.
Even if the copyright on these blank lines were to be valid, it would be reasonable to claim that your own use of blank lines was independent, not a derivative work copying from theirs.
Patents do not require actual copying to infringe, but copyright does. If you can prove you did not know of the original work, or otherwise would have come up with the same thing on your own, that's enough to absolve you of copyright issues.
Proof of direct copying may not be required, if AT&T can instead prove Access and Substantial Similarity.
For access it could be a little tricky, certainly every one that has posted a reply here has had access, and if this post is popular enough it could be argued anyone could or has had access (this happened in some music cases in the last few years).
For Substantial Similarity your definitely in trouble if you have exactly 3 blank lines and probably in trouble if you have 2 or 4 blank lines, but you may be fine if you have like 6 or 12 blank lines.
While I'm being a bit sarcastic about the number of lines being "substantially similar", the legal standard in the US is not if you actually copied something, but if the plaintiff can convince a judge/jury that it's more likely that you copied it than it is that you created it on your own.
> Patents do not require actual copying to infringe, but copyright does.
In other words, if you use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to copy these blank lines, then you infringe AT&T copyright. If you don't and add blank lines by other means - you don't ;)
> The /bin/true (or /usr/bin/true) command is now nearly obsolete, because most extant shells now have a builtin "true" command. But it's still useful occasionally, for various silly reasons [...]
This make it sound like this is useless, but I disagree. For example, recently I had some games crash because they couldn't find pulseaudio, and making a symlink from pulseaudio to /bin/true fixed my issue (and yes, they had sound). So there are certainly legitimate uses for it.
Well the symlink command was also easier to share with others having the same issue, whereas a one liner that creates an executable script which returns 0 is less ideal.
“Note that there is one less blank line here; it has been replaced by the #! line. But otherwise it is identical. Sun has merely passed on the copyright notice. I wonder if Sun has written permission from AT&T to use blank lines in their code?”
Fun fact: SVR4 was a joint AT&T/Sun project, so this was a SunOS file originally — I believe the “SMI” in the #ident line stands for “Sun Microsystems Inc.” and was a standard feature of all our SCCS identifiers.
On macos, /usr/bin/true is 118K, not counted the linked shared libSystem.dylib. I wonder what did they put in there? Doesn't seem to have --version or any GNU bells and whistles of that nature.
Based on a quick check of the disassembly, _exit is dynamically linked. It appears that because of that dynamic linkage, there's some information stored for dyld to use. That data seems to be split across a few sections which are loaded with padding.
It's also a fat binary. It contains both an X64 and AArch64 version.
Google: "(in US copyright law) the doctrine that brief excerpts of copyright material may, under certain circumstances, be quoted verbatim for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research, without the need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder.".
Readit News
Sorry for the little OT rant, but I'll have to object to that. That's IMO less of a lawyer thing, and more a "asking a field expert a generic question and expecting an immediate, brief answer" kind of thing.
In my experience, if you straight up ask any field expert, be it a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, etc... a vague, but obviously case specific question, the real experts will rather try to point out that they lack necessary background information and that the underlying subject matter is not that simple ("It depends", "I'd have to look into this", "Well uhmmm, possibly/maybe/yes/kind of, but...", "It's not that simple").
If you're not particularly familiar with some subject matter, it is kind of hard to gauge that the "simple question" might be very vague, maybe confuse some subject matter and might be edging on a very complex topic.
I take it most people here have some sort of programming background? Just try to remember the last family gathering where someone started pestering you about their computer problems, or tried to start small talk about something they picked up in the headlines. Or maybe a meeting with management where you were asked a "but couldn't you just [simply]...." kind of question (or even worse: "exactly how long will this take?") and they tried to press you for a swift, immediate answer.
From my experience so far, I'd even go further and suggest to be skeptical of any "expert" who has a habit of confidently answering briefly and to the point.
A question of 'law' vs 'facts'
Yes, if your integrity is worthless.
Independent derivation of a work is defense against copyright infringement.
Even if the copyright on these blank lines were to be valid, it would be reasonable to claim that your own use of blank lines was independent, not a derivative work copying from theirs.
Patents do not require actual copying to infringe, but copyright does. If you can prove you did not know of the original work, or otherwise would have come up with the same thing on your own, that's enough to absolve you of copyright issues.
For access it could be a little tricky, certainly every one that has posted a reply here has had access, and if this post is popular enough it could be argued anyone could or has had access (this happened in some music cases in the last few years).
For Substantial Similarity your definitely in trouble if you have exactly 3 blank lines and probably in trouble if you have 2 or 4 blank lines, but you may be fine if you have like 6 or 12 blank lines.
While I'm being a bit sarcastic about the number of lines being "substantially similar", the legal standard in the US is not if you actually copied something, but if the plaintiff can convince a judge/jury that it's more likely that you copied it than it is that you created it on your own.
In other words, if you use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to copy these blank lines, then you infringe AT&T copyright. If you don't and add blank lines by other means - you don't ;)
This make it sound like this is useless, but I disagree. For example, recently I had some games crash because they couldn't find pulseaudio, and making a symlink from pulseaudio to /bin/true fixed my issue (and yes, they had sound). So there are certainly legitimate uses for it.
Fun fact: SVR4 was a joint AT&T/Sun project, so this was a SunOS file originally — I believe the “SMI” in the #ident line stands for “Sun Microsystems Inc.” and was a standard feature of all our SCCS identifiers.
It's also a fat binary. It contains both an X64 and AArch64 version.
I think it has to be exactly these three blank lines, not just any three blank lines.
ref: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Previous discussions:
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3528663 in 2012
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15457281 in 2017
Google: "(in US copyright law) the doctrine that brief excerpts of copyright material may, under certain circumstances, be quoted verbatim for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research, without the need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder.".