From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 21:53:24 -0400

For your amusement, here's what I got this afternoon from
him in the midst of a continuing conversation.  I'm concocting
the answer.

Abt a hand-written note, no, but I do have some old correspondence
asking about things.  We shall see.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed Apr  4 16:40:55 EDT 2001
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: ancient Unix question 

> The one you probably know about was the USL vs BSDI and
> shortly the regents of U California about trade secret and copyright
> issues, which did reach prelimination litigation in federal court,
> and was settled after Judge Debevoise made some rulings that
> didn't look good for USL. I still have much of the public paperwork
> (machine-readable) about this.

I have the documents that were posted to the BSDI ftp site
(ftp.bsdi.com/bsdi/info/usl). If you have anything that's not posted there, I'd
love to see it. Also, Kirk McKusick has sent me a box of documents which has
not arrived yet. The only thing I don't have that I'd really like to see is the
Memorandum for Record mentioned in footnote 2 of the March 30, 1993 court
ruling --

       n2 AT&T's policy of affixing copyright notice apparently began about
       July 16, 1984. AT&T's "Memorandum For Record" of that date, the
       document that implemented the policy, discusses issues that are
       characteristic of the initial implementation of a new policy. (Earhart
       Decl., Ex. A at P 4, 5.)

I suppose this is probably under seal.

Regarding the on-again/off-again copyright notices on the early Unix sources, I
have gotten the following story from Steve Johnson, and I thought you might
have some comments on it or some related stories to add:

        I believe at the time that
        copyrighting source code required that all the code be
        placed in the Library of Congress.  The lawyers first
        demanded that every fine, including data files for programs
        such as cron, be copyrighted.  In many cases, this required
        us to recognize a comment convention for the data in the
        file, which in turn required us to change the programs
        that read those data files.  This was a major pain.
        
        We had no sooner finished doing this than the lawyers
        reversed their stand, believing that the danger of putting
        the source code in the Library of Congress was greater
        than the danger of treating it as a trade secret with a
        licencing agreement.  They then required us to remove
        all the copyright notices.

The Version 7 Unix tape I have has this comment in /usr/doc/cman:

        Sorry, but for copyright reasons, the source
        for the C Reference Manual is not distributed.

Do you know if this has anything to do with the publication of the K&R book?

Finally, for some reason I'm really curious about wump.c... Is there a story
behind this? It looks like it was translated from BASIC into C from the first
1973 issue of the PCC newsletter, so I assume Bell Telephone Labs was
subscribed to that publication or someone picked up a copy on a trip to
California. Hunt the Wumpus shows up in various guises throughout this story
(it was actually one of the programs cloned for the BSD Net/2 distribution). Do
you know any details of its early history?

>        Regards and good luck, and if your project turns up
>         anything interesting, let me know!

Thanks a lot for your help! This project has turned out to be far more fruitful
than I thought when I started out, and I am basically drowning in interesting
material. I'll be sure to send you a draft when one is available.

---
Greg Pomerantz