Yes, if the licensing terms are unclear, to err on the side of caution, it is best to assume "All rights reserved" by the authors of the software so you don't accidentally violate the authors' rights. And then hire a lawyer to sort this matter for you.
> If you didn't mention the license, it was in public domain.
I don't think this has ever been the case. If a license is not mentioned, it is always "All rights reserved" by the authors of the project, by the Berne convention (1886).
However, the United States did not join the Berne Convention until 1988, and prior to 1978 it did not automatically grant federal copyright when a work was created; instead you had to register your work with the Copyright Office in order to receive federal protection. There were also some state-level protections at the time that did not require registration, but apparently they weren't very strong.
While I don't know if license and copyright are the same thing, the film Night of the Living Dead was famously accidentally added to the public domain due to a forgotten copyright notice.
Yes, if the licensing terms are unclear, to err on the side of caution, it is best to assume "All rights reserved" by the authors of the software so you don't accidentally violate the authors' rights. And then hire a lawyer to sort this matter for you.
Yes. Also not to be confused with being Unlicense-d [0], because heaven forbid we use reasonable names for anything.
[0] https://opensource.org/license/unlicense
It used to be like that, yes. If you didn't mention the license, it was in public domain. Those times are long gone though.
> If you didn't mention the license, it was in public domain.
I don't think this has ever been the case. If a license is not mentioned, it is always "All rights reserved" by the authors of the project, by the Berne convention (1886).
However, the United States did not join the Berne Convention until 1988, and prior to 1978 it did not automatically grant federal copyright when a work was created; instead you had to register your work with the Copyright Office in order to receive federal protection. There were also some state-level protections at the time that did not require registration, but apparently they weren't very strong.
While I don't know if license and copyright are the same thing, the film Night of the Living Dead was famously accidentally added to the public domain due to a forgotten copyright notice.
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Unlicensed does not mean public domain