[GTALUG] legal history of university AUPs, was Re: For Chris: Commodore BASIC as a scripting language

[D. Joe]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 08:49:44AM -0400, Russell Reiter via talk wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 12:01 PM James Knott via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> 
>     I nominate Altair BASIC!  ;-)
> 
>     http://altairbasic.org/
>     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC 
> 
> 
> Interesting how legal jargon influenced its development. Harvard at the time,
> did not have a written policy regarding authorized use of computers for
> commercial purposes. They have since written one. 
> 
> https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/its/its-policies/usage-policy
> 
> This gives them a measure of control over the purpose of the academic research
> tools and the environment Harvard provides and protects the resultant research
> from unauthorized commercial explotation.
> 
> You'd think Harvard Law school would have understood law at the time.

The law has changed signficantly since then, and probably in no small part *because* of what happened also in the meantime. It can be a challenge to see that history clearly through the veil of what has happened since.

The US Dole-Bayh Act (1980) really boosted creation of what we now know as the university "tech transfer" office, clarifying how universities can use the fruits of government-funded research. 

I find it an underappreciated, underdiscussed contributor to research climates, climates that in turn led--at least as I read the history--to the creation of the GNU project, the GPL, the Unix wars, etc. ... a kind of deregulatory-driven "land rush" if you will, in which it was clear maybe for the first time that universities were first-class participants. But that shift from collegiality to competition didn't suit everyone.

Then Apple vs. Franklin (1983) clarified that software qualified as a literary work under US copyright law. 

That Harvard policy makes reference to the DMCA (1998) which as I recall gave the impetus to one of the most recent last big round of rewrites of acceptable use policies, which previously owed a lot to restrictions on commercial use of university Internet connections. 

Only a decade before had the US finally acceded to the Berne Convention. So, birthright copyright is comparably fairly new in the US (in contrast, Canada acceded in the 1920s). 

Amongst those of us of a certain age in the US, who don't have legal training, I suspect the lore persists that copyright restrictions apply only if the copyright for the work has been registered--this used to be true in living memory. How much this largely superseded notion continues to get passed along informally to subsequent generations one can only guess, but I think it remains prevalent, sometimes manifesting as shoot-the-messenger impatience in the face of licensing discussions: Those of us who prefer to use and create works with free licenses didn't make it inconveniently complicated, we're just trying to navigate an already complex situation in which works are born, as it were, non-free.

-- 
Joe

> There is
> a necessary legal implication when drafting policy, like trespass to private
> property. If the intent is to restrict use of private facilities, then that
> activity which is not specifically listed cannot be restricted under those
> writings.