The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

Posted Mar 5, 2023 11:50 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by gdt
Parent article: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

> As for more modern Unix, the claim "*ALL* AT&T code is effectively Public Domain" is a stretch. UNSW-authored files are obviously not public domain (as this is not a concept in Australia's copyright law).

Please use your brain! Sorry to be damn blunt, but this was drummed into us on Groklaw.

UNSW-authored files are - quite clearly - *not* AT&T code. So UNSW-authored files are not included in the claim about AT&T code.

They seem to have been lumped in with the Berkeley code, and are assumed to be BSD-licenced, but everyone assumes they are "free to use", presumably with good cause, and nobody seems to know what that code is anyway.

The legal status is presumably pretty clear. UNSW will have stuck a copyright notice on it. AT&T removed said notice - an act of dubious and vandalous legality, given that those notices were applied in a jurisdiction that recognised them, and outside of the US those copyright statements are still valid. Which probably means exporting that old code is a copyright violation :-) but at the end of the day nobody cares.

Cheers,
Wol