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Length of copyrightLength of copyrightPosted Aug 21, 2008 9:40 UTC (Thu) by addw (guest, #1771)Parent article: Why the JMRI decision matters How long before copyright on software starts to expire ? OK: this is prob a long way off, but ... wikipedia gives some info it varies a lot by country, but this seems to talk about books, films, etc. Where does software fit in ? It would seem that copyright expiry would affect FLOSS more than proprietary s/ware. Useful bits of FLOSS code will be usable once that version of the source hits expiry and could then be used in new proprietary code. Useful bits could well remain useful for many years. Proprietary code is (usually) only available as a binary and thus is only useful as a whole and if you have a suitable machine/OS to run it under.
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Length of copyright Posted Feb 2, 2009 19:11 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]
In many countries, the duration of copyright is the same for everything. Most of the world is life of the author plus 50-70 years.
US copyright duration is a complex mess of grandfather clauses, but
* any code first published in the US without a copyright notice prior to 1978 (or 1989 in some cases) is in the public domain. A host of other clauses may apply to put it in the public domain in this period, too minor in this case to be noteworthy here; see http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/ .
* any code published before 1978 with a copyright notice has 95 years of copyright from publication
* any code published after 1977 and before 2003 by an author who died before 1978 will be in copyright until 2048
* withstanding the last clause, code published after 1977 will be under copyright for the life of the author plus 70 years, or a flat 95 years if a work of corporate authorship
There is some body of code prior to 1978 that is in the public domain due to lack of copyright formalities; AT&T settled with Berkeley over early Unix because the judge refused a preliminary injunction on Berkeley because he found it likely that Unix code had so fallen into the public domain. http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/ says "IBM, by corporate policy, does not assert copyright ownership of any software which it distributed without copyright notices." Other than that, it's all under copyright for a long, long time.
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