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

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: D. Joe via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

An excellent and informative post.

| 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.

Are you in the US?

My understanding of US law (shaky!!) is that damages are limited
if you didn't register the copyright.

The other thing that USAnian (and Canadian) people don't understand is
the "moral rights" component of copyright.  The US copyright law got
this concept by way of Berne.

I had heard that US residents don't have moral rights under copyright law
in the US but foreigners do.  I don't think that these have been
asserted often.

Even in Canada, moral rights are pretty rarely invoked.  I only
remember one example: Michael Show vs Eaton Centre vis a vis ribons on
the Canada Geese sculptures.  (Snow won).

I imagine that moral rights could be useful in the open source world.