Link to full article.

Even if he flat out stole the thing, 1973 was almost 40 years ago -- long past any statute of limitations. So where's the justification in trying to force him to return it?

The setting isn't download safe files, it's run safe files after downloading.

Not even close to the same thing.

And yes, even the existence of such a setting is stupid.

You know a craftsman by his work. Programmers, real programmers, are always fiddling, and love to show off. Imagine if you were hiring a mad scientist, and he came to the interview with zero crazy schemes for world domination and had never grafted a deadly weapon to a deadlier life form. Would you take her seriously? Would you hire an astronomer who never looked through a telescope beyond school hours? No. Would you hire a ballplayer who just majored in the sport, and had never played a single game?

There are doers and couch warmers. Doers know doers. Couch warmers know couches,

...to the first interview without having developed something? I got into programming because I loved programming. I was writhing games in BASIC at 10. By 16 I had picked up C. My freshman year of college I was running servers on my machine in the dorm. By my junior year I was coding professionally. (Never did end up graduating come to think of it...)

When employers want to hear about hobbies, they want to hear about hobbies like mine. Writing web registration apps for large non-profits. Building IPhone apps. Programming micro controllers.

Coding is a lifestyle, it's not a major.

You're saying that it's udderly ridiculous?

For $600 you could have gotten an iPhone with all of that. In 2007. Today, you could pick up 6 late model, or two high end, or one gold plated latest model with the extended warranty, tinted windows, and curb feelers.

What was the argument for the Android again?

It looks to me like the Copyright Office accepted the renewal. Had they not, the record would/should show the original registration only, and you would be left to compute that since the original copyright was filed in 1954 and was not renewed, that the work was now in the public domain.

Also, the link you posted was for The Broken Sword, not for Brainwave.

About 12 years ago, I contacted PG because I was doing some work with pulp stories from the '30's that were public domain, and would have been great to get on the site. While they were a really flaky outfit to deal with, they did have a number of paranoid copyright attorneys at the top of the structure that carefully vetted anything that was even proposed to be included on the site. There must be some kind of story behind how these sci-fi stories managed to bypass that process. The instance cited in the article --

-- is irrelevant because as a general rule of publishing in those magazines, copyright was assigned to the magazine. If the magazine screwed up and didn't renew its copyrights; or simply went out of business, in which case no one was tracking their assets; or got bought out by some other entity and the record keeping went all pear shaped, copyright did not magically revert to the author. Nor is there any precedent to have an author reassert their copyright claim on works that have been assigned to others. The instance in which the magazine did not file a copyright is obviously a specialized case.

...This has got to be seen as a win for the band. They have to pay royalties back to 2002... which is >20 years since the song was released and became a monster hit. Surely its earnings potential has slacked off some since then. Imagine how bad it would be if they had to come up with royalties back to its heyday...