Copyrighting empty files (was Re: Must UNIX be a memory hog?)

[Barry Margolin]

In article <31529 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>Actually, although humorous, I wonder about the legal implications of
>that /bin/true which contains nothing but a copyright notice (and
>perhaps one blank line.)
>
>One could make an argument that AT&T ran around blindly copyrighting
>everything in sight without being bothered to so much as inventory its
>copyright value or verify that there were any contents to which their
>copyrights could lay claim to or be properly assigned.
[lots of stuff deleted]
>I would be interested in any case law which dealt with frivolous use
>of the copyright law who's only purpose was to restrain trade rather
>than protect a creative work (eg. someone trying to copyright a blank
>book and lay claim to the concept of a blank book, as opposed to the
>design of a particular blank book.)

I'm not a lawyer (but I play one on the net)...

There are several misconceptions about copyright evidenced here.
First of all, copyright doesn't protect concepts, it only protects the
expression of a concept; patents exist to protect concepts themselves.
The big difference between the two protection mechanisms can be shown
in the case of independent invention: if you patent something, and I
then develop something identical without knowing about your version, I
would violate your patent if I were to sell mine; if you and I both
write identical poems independently, we both have rights to our
versions -- you have to intentionally COPY something to violate a
copyright.

The second misconception is that you have to assign a value to
something in order to copyright it.  First, you don't have to do
ANYTHING to copyright something; by default, the author of a creative
work is the copyright holder.  Affixing a copyright notice and
registering the work with the Copyright Office are formalities that
are generally necessary in order to win a potential copyright
infringement case, but they are not officially necessary (I think it's
sort of similar to the need for a written contract -- it's hard to
prove that someone has violated a verbal contract when there are no
impartial witnesses).

So, an author automatically holds the copyright on something he
writes.  If he's smart, he automatically stamps it with his notice in
order to let others know that he holds the rights.  There's no
requirement that he actually think about this, since the copyright
notice is simply asserting an existing fact, not that he actually
CARES.  The way the courts generally decide whether you care is based
on whether you've taken additionally steps to protect your rights.
For instance, if you know that someone has copied a piece and don't
try to stop them, then you may lose your rights to THAT piece.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar