Funny that ... I just searched these forums for "copyright" and got 600 results.

Perhaps you could elaborate on why you think a copyright is inappropriate?

You might find this article enlightening:
The Purpose of Copyright by Lydia Pallas Loren
Lydia Pallas Loren is Associate Professor of Law, Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College.

are you running the script command,which dumps everything into a file!

I understand it is a good idea to copyright code and use a public license ... ??? Not sure why -- when the code is published somewhere as public as LQ then "prior art" is well established and nobody can claim copyright ... ???

Posting something somewhere doesn't immediately invalidate the copyright. The whole point of copyright is to allow people to publish works knowing they can legally enforce certain rights and controls.

'Prior art' is a patent concept, I believe; namely, a patent can be invalidated if it shown that someone else was doing it first.

Typically, when we're talking about free software licenses, we don't refer to them as copyright of any kind, primarily due to the semantic preferences of one RMS having taken root long ago.

What he did should stand, legally. I just found it odd. I've taken that conversation with him to visitor messages, lest we turn this thread into a battleground.

IANAL (though you could say I've had a lot of contact with them).

I think a good reference for this issue can be found in the wikipedia entry Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights where the following is stated:

The requirements of TRIPS

TRIPS requires member states to provide strong protection for intellectual property rights. For example, under TRIPS:

* Copyright terms must extend to 50 years after the death of the author, although films and photographs are only required to have fixed 50 and to be at least 25 year terms, respectively.(Art. 7(2),(4))
* Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations or systems of renewal.
* Computer programs must be regarded as "literary works" under copyright law and receive the same terms of protection.
* National exceptions to copyright (such as "fair use" in the United States) are constrained by the Berne three-step test
* Patents must be granted in all "fields of technology," although exceptions for certain public interests are allowed (Art. 27.2 and 27.3 [1]) and must be enforceable for at least 20 years (Art 33).
* Exceptions to the exclusive rights must be limited, provided that a normal exploitation of the work (Art. 13) and normal exploitation of the patent (Art 30) is not in conflict.
* No unreasonable prejudice to the legitimate interests of the right holders of computer programs and patents is allowed.
* Legitimate interests of third parties have to be taken into account by patent rights (Art 30).
* In each state, intellectual property laws may not offer any benefits to local citizens which are not available to citizens of other TRIPs signatories by the principles of national treatment (with certain limited exceptions, Art. 3 and 5 [2]). TRIPS also has a most favored nation clause.

Many of the TRIPS provisions on copyright were imported from the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and many of its trademark and patent provisions were imported from the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property.

Use following four commands from VI editor to solve this problem
Convert from dos/unix to unix
To convert the current file from any mixture of CRLF/LF-only line endings, so all lines end with LF only:

:update Save any changes.
:e ++ff=dos Edit file again, using dos file format ('fileformats' is ignored).[A 1]
:setlocal ff=unix This buffer will use LF-only line endings when written.[A 2]
:w Write buffer using unix (LF-only) line endings.