On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 16:04, Richard Braakman wrote: > On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 03:43:19PM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote: > > [...] I still think it would be hard for the defendant to > > convince a court that he was ignorant of the *de facto* convention > > that people put "(c)" in computer programs to assert their copyright. > > Actually, the convention is "Copyright (c)", which meets the > requirements anyway because of the explicit "Copyright". I've > never seen anyone put "(c)" by itself without the "Copyright". > > (This is also why I'm wondering why this is being argued about > at all. Just write "Copyright (c)" or just "Copyright" and be > done with it. If you really want to save keystrokes and write > just "(c)", then don't come crying to me if you don't get > punitive damages :-) > Especially as Copyright is a fairly global thing, so the exact laws differ from country to country anyway.
I mentioned this thread to my solicitor earlier, just out of pure interest, and he was on the opinion that as "(c)" or "(C)" are the most common, not to mention closest, representation of the symbol in computer source code that any sane judge would accept them (in the UK, at least). Though a Copyright notice here does little other than assert the name of the author of the work, for identification purposes only. All work is inherently copyrighted and there is significant test case that "I couldn't find a copyright notice" is not a valid defence for breach. Scott -- Who isn't a lawyer :-)
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