Comment by fhdkweig
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.
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.
Wow. I didn't know that. Looks like this is a very US thing. I looked up now and TIL that US adopted the Berne convention as late as 1989. I'm surprised. So this movie released in 1966 didn't have default "all rights reserved" due to Berne convention. But most European countries, like 80%, had adopted the Berne convention by 1925. So when software was developed in Europe they automatically got "all rights reserved".
I believe that was a forgotten renewal of copyright status.
That's because the US was not part of the Berne Convention until 1989, so before that U.S. works often had protection only if certain formalities were met (like registration or notice).