> Obviously, I am not a laywer.
Me neither :)
> Do the expiration times not presuppose that the copyrighted work is in
> its final form at publication time (such as movies or books)? Free
> software, especially if it remains in widespread use, is continuously
> developed, updated, fixed and re-released, which (in my humble
> non-lawyer opinion) should reset the copyright expiration timer.
In the license and copyright course I had at $DAYJOB (it wasn't some
videos to watch on a website) this came up.
At least the lawyer there seems to believe that the copyright for a
certain version does expire, but the changes and fixes done later
extend for longer and don't go into public domain automatically when
other parts of the code enter public domain.
So in practice a new version will still fall under copyright generally.
> And if that's actually the case, I'd say any software which remains
> completely unmaintained for 95 years to trigger copyright expiration is
> very unlikely to be practically relevant, and will probably not even
> compile any more.
Yup.
--
Salvo Tomaselli
I difensori della morale tradizionale sono raramente persone di cuore. Si è
tentati di pensare che essi si servano della morale come di legittimo sfogo
al loro desiderio di fare del male agli altri.
-- Bertrand Russell, Perché non sono cristiano. 1957
http://ltworf.github.io/
