in the first place). In that case if the firm disappears, the copyright will pass through its "estate" to, depending on circumstances, its creditors, whoever buys that Jean late last year they didn't get their man - but they did bag a whole lab full of Macintosh computers. And it's anybody's guess whether the school board will ever see them back. For that matter, only the actions of a teacher suspended for her honesty may save any of the principal, the superintendent and assorted trustees from being marched out in manacles as the case develops.

   According to news reports, the situation developed when the school board bought a classroom full of Macs, but deferred deciding between buying a multi-site licence or hard disc network for the commercial software used on them. The board subsequently changed its mind, and switched the rest of their purchasing to MS-DOS computers instead.

   Meanwhile, the Mac lab teacher had been told, as a temporary measure, to copy the commercial software until a decision was made. She did so, under written protest. But when the Macs were sidetracked and no licence bought, she refused to carry on with the illegal practice. She was suspended as a result, which         attracted the attention of the RCMP when a local radio station broke the news.

   Great, but what's all this doing in an ADAM newsletter? Quite simply: it could happen to you. Under revisions to Canada's Copyright Act, proclaimed in February 1988, if you make a copy of ADAMcalc and give it to your brother, you could be fined a million dollars and/or sent to the slammer for five years.

   If this information makes the hairs on the back of your neck start to rise, we'll try and explain the situation for those interested. In the process, we'll try to explain what is copyright and why, what public domain means, and what is legal fair use - and what isn't.

   If you create a new and original product - a new drug, a new machine, a better mousetrap - you can apply for, and usually get, a patent on it. This means that anyone who wants to obtain the item must either buy it from you, the inventor, or buy a licence from you to copy it. You may be aware that the copy need not be exact; anything duplicating your original mode of operation, as well as the general character of the product, will often constitute infringement. People who infringe patents can be enjoined, sued, and often fined and jailed.

   The idea behind all of this is that invention benefits all people, and therefore inventors who develop something that meets a real need (say aspirin, for instance, or a VCR) should be allowed to profit from their efforts by holding a monopoly on the production and sale of the product for a limited time period
asei t the article needed to say, in what style, in what sequence, with what words; in fact deal with all the things your poor English teachers spent a dozen years trying to drill into your head. Then there was the investment of my time and effort wearing out my poor beleagured ADAM putting this into a form in which it could be conveyed to you. (I'm strictly a search, discover and land typist; even on ADAM the effort isn't small).

   I therefore have every right to state, as is done for me on the title page of every issue of MTAG, that this is my work and you cannot copy it without my express permission. Copying, by the way, includes what reporters call a scalp, that is taking someone else's work and simply re-wording it a bit, but without adding any new creative input or otherwise fundamentally increasing its worth.

   A guy who creates a new piece of software is in exactly the same boat for exactly the same reasons. So let's examine what I am doing, and draw a parallel with what say Danny Kehoe of Calgary might do with his SmartTerm modem programme.

   If you read our title page closely, you'll see this article belongs to me. No one can use it without my permission. If, say, some pirate in Pennsylvania decides to photocopy this issue of MTAG and sell the copy to someone, and I find out about it, I can sue him and collect (as can MTAG, for the rest of the contents)    because he has taken my property without my permission.

   Similarly, if you buy a copy of SmartTerm and then make duplicate tapes to distribute to all your modeming friends, you are taking Danny Kehoe's property without his permission. Remember copyright does not apply to the physical tape or disc, it applies to the intellectual content. You can't take SmartTerm, LIST it out, change a cosmetic command here and there, and use, copy or sell it as your own. If you make use of Danny's effort you pay for Danny's effort - or listen for the Horsemen at your door.

   Of course, I cherish the fond delusions that all the other ADAMites in user groups out there are my good buddies, and actually find my incoherent rantings of some interest. And one does not make one's bosom friends pay for such throwaway scribblings as this. So you'll also notice on our title page that any genuine, non-profit ADAM group is free to reprint this (or just about anything else from MTAG). But notice - this is my property, and when I lend it I make conditions. The condition on the title page of MTAG is that they must credit the writer and source. May not be good for my wallet, but it's great for my ego!

   Similarly, Danny Kehoe might very well send out free samples of SmartTerm - perhaps a beta test version to get feedback and work out the bugs, or final examples to selected BBS operators to demonstrate the product and encourage its use. Or he may just decide not to profit from it, but do it as a community service (like the MTAG article writers). An author may give away free copies of a book, too. That does not affect the copyright whether the work is a book, article or computer programme. It still can't be copied without the creator's express permission.

   A patent generally is valid for about 17 years. If the idea can't make a satisfactory profit in that time, it likely wasn't worth much in the first place. Copyright also has a time limit, which varies from country to country, but if you assume the life of the author plus 50 years, you're likely in the right league.  Since personal computers have only been around for about ten years, you may assume no copyrights have expired yet.

   Problems can arise when a copyright is held by a corporation, and something (like, say, bankruptcy) happens to the corporation.  It depends on what the deal was with the person who actually did the work. Sometimes an employee will be required to assign copyright in absolute terms to his employer (since the emloyer is paying him to create it in the first place). In that case if the firm disappears, the copyright will pass through its "estate" to, depending on circumstances, its creditors, whoever buys that part of its assets, the shareholders, or whoever else ends up with legal title to what the company owned. If a company with a truck goes broke, it doesn't lose title to the truck, and a copyright is an asset like a truck.

   At other times, computer firms may simply buy a limited copyright from the copyright owner. Thus for instance Coleco might buy the right from Sega to record the software of a game called "Carnival" in an agreed number of copies in a Colecovision format. This is generally referred to as a licence. But note Coleco never has any ownership in "Carnival"; it simply buys the right, on the payment of an agreed fee, to copy it a certain number of times.  Anyone who wants to make a copy of "Carnival" must apply to Sega for the right to copy, which Sega may or may not grant. 

   Notice in this what Coleco is buying is not a tangible good; they are buying an idea. Coleco might buy the right to format the idea as firmware on a cartridge. Atari might buy the right to do it on a different shaped cartridge modified to respond to a different operating system and graphic environment. It doesn't matter; Sega owns the idea and Sega collects. And depending on the licencing contract, Sega can resell the idea elsewhere (say to Telegames USA) as long as that does not violate the rights already sold to Coleco and Atari. Incidentally, Telegames could buy the rights to put the game on tape or disc too. Format doesn't matter; content does.

   It's worth relating some of this to the ADAM. We don't know for sure what parts of the copyright Coleco bought to the products they issued. SmartBasic and SmartLogo were developed specifically for the ADAM. The evidence is that SmartLogo was issued under licence, though, and the copyright remains in the hands of the Logo developers. SmartBasic was apparently an in-house project. It is said by those who claim to know that when Coleco dropped the ADAM, they made a public declaration that they would not prosecute infringement of copyright on their in-house, unreleased material.  This is said to include SmartBasic 2.0, Adamlink II, the DaVinci graphics programme, and a number of others. It does not include ADAMcalc, SmartFiler, Smart Letters & Forms, Recipe Filer, Expertype or any other issued programmes. CP/M 2.2 was not owned by Coleco; they issued their version under licence.

   The bottom line with Coleco products, then, is that if Coleco ever sold a copy of it publicly, it is not public domain and you can't copy it. If it was a project under development that leaked out later, Coleco are disinclined to defend their rights, or may have simply renounced them. Especially with the games that were leaked, one reason they were "thrown out" is that the development was not complete and they may have bugs or lack documentation.

   In the paragraph above I used the phrase "public domain". This does not mean what most computer users think it means. Strictly speaking, "public domain" materials are those so old that the copyright on them has expired - which is why some of those "golden oldie" records or reprints of "classic" books are so relatively cheap; no royalties or copyright use fees need to be paid. Some items lack attributable intelectual content, and simply can't be copyrighted. Most of what is termed public domain in computer use strictly speaking isn't; rather it is material on which the copyright is released or not enforced.

   Thus for instance if I am suddenly struck with so brilliant an idea that I know all the ADAM world must be told about it as soon as possible, I may choose to announce it by publishing it as widely as I can myself, and include a notice to the effect that the copyright is foregone, released or whatever. What I am really doing in this case is saying that I am abandoning my right to the particular piece of property in question, and anyone who wants to is free to take it and use it as their own.

   Why would someone do this? My wife recently contributed a tax programme that runs under ADAMcalc to our PD collection. The programme works perfectly to calculate our taxes. But it doesn't cover the whole tax form. We have no dependent children, so that calculation is missing. We have no capital gain to claim this year. There are various other omissions.

   But, it's a fair guess that any MTAG member who buys a download of this programme will be planning to use it. The buyer's benefit will be that most of the work is already done, and the methodology is clear enough that only a little thought and typing will be needed to adapt it to his needs. Once this is done, he will be encouraged to feed the upgraded model back into the system, in the hopes that others will do the same. A few cycles like this and we'll have a tax calc programme that will cover every line on the long form, and upgrading it for 1990 will be a cinch. Everyone will benefit from the cooperative effort.

   Thus many programmes in the public domain were put there by someone who had to do the work anyway and decided to share it, or came up with a bright idea they would like to see improved. It can be anything from a game to a new type font that needs just a little touching up for dot matrix printing. It may represent someone illustrating a point such as a special programming technique, or a commercial software producer putting out a "premium" that just happens to work best when you buy the parent programme he'd like to sell you. They can range from simple to highly sophisticated, and from quite useless to (especially in CP/M) pretty well essential. But all are there for a reason.

   And that reason is that somehow, somewhere the creator of the programme belives that he will get a better return for his efforts by not claiming any visible payment for his work. So he'll be delighted to let you copy it without charging and without applying for formal permission. But technically, though we call it public domain, it isn't - the right is still there; it has just been declined.

   So if you're allergic to the police pawing through your discs, and nasty days in nasty courtrooms, don't copy software and don't buy from people who do. You may legally make a backup copy of a programme, but only for use on the same machine, and you may not meanwhile loan out the original for use elsewhere. What else constitutes "fair use" is presently a very grey area of the law.  You can't legally copy documentation, though. And software only comes into the public domain through a positive public declaration by the creator or his agent. If you don't know who released a programme when, don't take someone elses word. It could mean trouble later.

   Two final considerations. When you call the plumber to your house to do you a service, you would not think of refusing to pay him. In effect, you'd be stealing his work and his time. When you copy a copyright programme, you are stealing the programmer's work and his time. Sure, the plumber's right there but where's the programmer? Think of it this way: are you only honest when someone is standing over you with a wrench in his hand? You also know that if you do cheat the plumber, he won't come back next time you're stuck with a flooded basement. Cheat the programmer and he won't write the software you're going to need next. In fact, no one will write for your computer at all.

   Copyright protects your interests. Defend it, honour it, and use it. And hang the pirates. 

