Fix this: The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

illoai at gmail.com illoai at gmail.com
Sun May 27 21:35:52 UTC 2007


On 27/05/07, Christian Walther <cptsalek at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27/05/07, Erik Trulsson <ertr1013 at student.uu.se> wrote:
> > On Sun, May 27, 2007 at 02:38:33AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > >
> [...]
> >
> > As I understand it the phrase 'All rights reserved' was required by older
> > copyright rules but is obsolete these days.
> > I.e. changing the wording so that 'All rights reserved' applies to both
> > copyright statements is pointless since it does not have any legal
> > significance any more.
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't "(C) - All rights reserved"
> something entirely different from the BSD License under which FreeBSD
> is licensed? This license grants it's users some rights very
> explicitely. I know that I can still be a Copyright owner when I
> choose to distribute a piece of work under a different license, but
> can I say that all rights are reserved when I actually do something
> else?

Rightly claiming copyright only witholds certain
uses from others.  "All rights reserved" was a
method of asserting that no rights except explicity
allowed were granted, since certain forms of
publication can imply certain copying rights (right
to backup software, right to transcribe music for
personal use) to the "end-user" (indeed, which
end?).  Any explicit copying rights granted by other
statements are, of course, not reserved by the "all
rights reserved" phrase.  Modern copyright law is
so hideously restrictive and explicit and morally
indefensable (it "creates sin where none exists")
that the phrase "all rights reserved" is deprecated.

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