svn commit: r333880 - head/sys/kern

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> --------
> In message <CANCZdfrMjf8LgwUy4rL53m-XAM9P0fa-cb=cD5+V5Br+evussw at mail.gmail.com>
> , Warner Losh writes:
> 
> >> > Log:
> >> >   Restore the all rights reserved language.
> 
> "All Rights Reserved" is boilerplate from the old "Buenos Aires"

I believe that boilerplate is the wrong term here, it was a
requirement of that convention to use this phrase if you wanted
to be protected by the Buenos Aires convention.

> copyright convention, (a purely N+S American affair) and it lost
> all meaning and relevance for UCB when USA ratified the Berne
> Convention 60 years ago.
The US ratify Berne in 1989 would not mean you should stop asserting
this clause, as if you wanted protection to apply in non-Berne, but
Buenos Aires contries you would need the "All rights reserved."

The only point at which you would really want to stop applying this
would be after 2000 when all countries of the Buenos Aires convention
had signed onto the Berne, thus making the Buenos Aires truely
obsolete.

I know these are fine hair splitting details, but that is how law
tends to work out.  

> The final Buenos Aires signatory joined Berne a couple of decades
> ago, rendering the convention null and void, and therefore this
> boilerplate has no meaning or relevance for anybody.

We understand that, but to remove it you technically do need the
permission of the person who placed it there, as though the
conventions in copyright no longer recognise this as having any
meaning, law, especially US law, do recognize this as a valid
assertion of rights.  This would especially hold true as 
UCB placed this on these files *after* the us adopted the
Berne convention, and before Nicaragu signed it in 2000.

> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org