[icebraining]

Public domain: any software made to run on current machines is too new to have expired copyright; the author(s) may have dedicated it to the PD, but you have to find that dedication, which is equivalent to a license.

Good faith: that may affect the amount of damages the copyright holder can extract, but it's still illegal to use the software.

Copyright notices: haven't been required for 30 years.

[benj111]

Copyright older than 30 years still requires the notice (and this is banking software).

My underlying point though was that it was an unreasonable answer, to just copy paste the previous answer. No one here that I've seen has claimed to be a lawyer, and no one I've seen has defined what nations laws we are talking about. At that level of discourse, the question posed, deserved a reasonable answer.

[icebraining]

> Copyright older than 30 years still requires the notice

Nope, only on works published over 30 years ago. This package was published only three years ago, regardless of when it was created.

There really isn't much nuance under the copyright rules almost universally agreed under treaties like Berne, UCC and TRIPS. This kind of what-ifing a clear statement just sounds like a bad movie trope.

[benj111]

We don't know when it was first published though. If its Cobol code, with dates from the 70s in the comments, that's different to if being JavaScript or some such.

And if you get enough money and lawyers in one place you can create plenty of nuance.

Dragonwriter reminded me of the term, implied licence in another subthread. That clearly seems arguable in this case even if it isn't considered winnable. Case law progresses through winning 'unwinnable' cases.

I think we're approaching this from completely different positions though. I appreciate the what-ifing, exploring the hypotheticals. It isn't as if we have any power to make a difference in a court of law, and I would hope no one is relying on this thread for legal advice.