[I'm not a lawyer, although I did misspend some of my youth, and did
study law at Glasgow University for a short while in the 1970s. - agc]

In 16/11/2007, Claus Andersen <clan@wheel.dk> wrote:
> On Fri, 16 Nov 2007, Alistair Crooks wrote:
>
> > On 15/11/2007, Masao Uebayashi <uebayasi@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> BTW - some of your code (lib/librefuse for example) have non-ASCII
> >> characters.  I think it's against NetBSD code convention. :)
> >
> > There is one character (the "Copyright symbol") in the leading comment
> > block, which could be considered to be "non-ASCII" i.e. not in the
> > range 0 to 127.
> >
> > For the reason why I do that, please take a look at the wikipedia entry:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
> >
> > specifically the last sentence of the part about the copyright symbol,
> > (which unfortunately needs a citation):
>
> Wasn't that awfully close to misquoting as the next paragraph states that
> the notice is implicit and is hence not needed according to the Berne
> Convention?
> (When used as support for introducing the unicode character almost looking
> like (c))

I'm fairly cautious of basing this on a critique around the wikipedia
entry, but the paragraph after that one is:

"In 1989, the U.S. enacted the Berne Convention Implementation Act,
amending the 1976 Copyright Act to conform to most of the provisions
of the Berne Convention. As a result, the use of copyright notices has
become optional to claim copyright, because the Berne Convention makes
copyright automatic.[3] However, notice of copyright (using these
marks) does have consequences in terms of allowable damages in an
infringement lawsuit in some places."

Note the last sentence (for which a citation is needed).

Nevertheless, thanks for the education - one of the problems of having
a good memory is that events can take place which render that memory
obsolete, and I apologise if I misled anyone. But read on before
victory is claimed, please...

> I do not know whether another Internet citation would hold any validity:
> http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

The end of the first point on that page says:

The correct form for a notice is:

	"Copyright [dates] by [author/owner]"

You can use C in a circle (c) instead of "Copyright" but "(C)" has
never been given legal force. The phrase "All Rights Reserved" used to
be required in some nations but is now not legally needed most places.
In some countries it may help preserve some of the "moral rights."

I have no idea of the legal training or experience of the author of
either entry, nor the jurisdiction for which the advice applies.

> > Whether or not that falls into NetBSD 's coding conventions or not,
> > it's there for protection.
>
> One might argue that:
> a) The copyright is implcitly given and could be left out (but it does
> look professional).
> b) Plenty of prior art exists for "(c)" although never taken to court per
> se I assume a lot of code has passed through the courtrooms with the "(c)"
> (The BSD source itself?)

Prior art is used in patent cases. Legal precedent is used in other
types of law. And the advice used to be "why take the chance that the
court will rule against you for want of a few more letters"?

> c) The word "Copyright" could be used rather than a fancy abbreviation.

The abbreviation is not fancy, given that its substitute has no
standing in law. Both "Copyright" and the symbol are used in my
source, but for some reason the ASCII fascists are out in force today.
FWIW, it used to be that more(1) flagged a file with the non-ASCII
copyright symbol as a binary file. A long time ago, in a pager far,
far away

> I am pro-unicode but I do not think that is the way to convince the world.
>
> My apologies but such arguments on a friday afternoon brings out my inner
> troll ;-)

I am neither pro nor anti Unicode. I have written utilities which work
with ASCII, Unicode and UTF-8. And I have fed the troll, since I
obviously don't have enough to do with my time. I have also probably
just inadvertently admitted to reading Internet news prior to 1989,
when the advice was that (c) was not a valid representation of the
Copyright symbol. Oh, wait...

> Rgds,
> Claus
>
> --
> Portions of this text is Copyright 2007 by Claus Andersen
> and released into the public domain
>
> The views and opinions expressed herein are... well you know the drill.
>

If you release something into the public domain, it can't be claimed
as copyright. And the subject is "Portions" so the verb should be
plural: "Portions of this text are..."

Now, what does all this have to do with the users of NetBSD?

Regards,
Alistair