mailto:Brian.Henderson@xxxxxxxx wrote:
So...I'm talking to Dave Erikson the other day and he tells me that he'd like to release the XyWrite source code into the public domain. He called me because my name is attached to xywrite.com and he was hoping that the site would be a way that he could contact the legal owner(s) of whatever there is to own of XyWrite. After the relief I felt that he wasn't calling to tell me to take down the site because I was infringing, I was very sorry to have to tell him that I couldn't help him. What Dave wants is to get permission to release the source code. He's pretty sure that none of the people associated with TTG, at its end, have control of the rights. He believes that TTG's creditors own the software, but he has no idea who they are.I consider it most unlikely that the TTG creditors now own the source code. Either the Bankruptcy Court approved a sale of the source code (perhaps as part of a package of TTG assets) to a particular person or entitity, or else the source code was "abandoned" -- i.e., none of the creditors wanted it and none believed it had a monetary value of sufficient consequence to justify the cost of an auction. As I understand bankruptcy law (and I am no expert), "abandoned property" reverts to the debtor, i.e. TTG, and upon TTG's dissolution, it presumably would revert to the shareholders. Thus, as a practical matter, the source code has fallen into a black hole, and will not re-appear unless and until some TTG shareholder brings an infringement suit (or one of the geniuses on this listserve reverse engineers the source code). Fred Gross |