Other
programmers could take inspiration from the work, but
to make a direct copy or nonsatirical derivative, they
first had to secure permission from the original
creator. Although the new law guaranteed that even
programs without copyright notices carried copyright
protection, programmers quickly asserted their rights,
attaching coypright notices to their software programs.
At first, Stallman viewed these notices with alarm.
Rare was the software program that didn't borrow source
code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke
of the president's pen, Congress had given programmers
and companies the power to assert individual authorship
over communally built programs. It also injected a dose
of formality into what had otherwise been an informal
system. Even if hackers could demonstrate how a given
program's source-code bloodlines stretched back years,
if not decades, the resources and money that went into
battling each copyright notice were beyond most
hackers' means. Simply put, disputes that had once been
settled hacker-to-hacker were now settled
lawyer-to-lawyer.
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