John,

On Fri, 08 Oct 2004 14:39:18 -0400, John Hansen wrote:

> And I'm sort of wondering where that leaves 
> their status under copyright law.  If you don't actively defend a trademark 
> it falls into the public domain.

Trademarks are completely different from copyright.  In Britain (I don't know about elsewhere) you have to 
register a trademark, and I think you have to pay for doing so.  It can't be descriptive (so trying to 
trademark "Screwdriver" won't get you anywhere!) and there are other rules.  

Copyright exists just by creating the "work" and you don't have to do anything to register it - it's 
automatically yours until 50 years after you die.  Of course, if the work is created by employees of a company 
on the firm's time, most companies claim the work and its copyright as theirs.  If the company ceases to 
exist, then the copyright has no owner to benefit from it any more.  As long as the company didn't pass on 
(sell or give) the rights to someone else, such as the company's founder in person, then there is no owner to 
claim damages for breach of copyright.

> I don't think the same thing happens with 
> a copyright, but if you no longer sell a piece of software and if you don't 
> have any organization which actively prosecutes copyright infringement, can 
> it really be ethically wrong to "pirate" this software?

Ethics don't come into it - if the entity that owned the copyright ceases to exist, there is no legal 
copyright in existance - it has to be owned!

I am not a lawyer, though!  :-)

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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