Re: cowsay could attract copyright and trademark enforcement action

[Bone Baboon]

Leo Famulari writes:

> On Sun, Jul 11, 2021 at 10:56:33PM -0400, Bone Baboon wrote:
>> cowsay has many questionable files that could attract copyright and
>> trademark enforcement action.
>
> I doubt it. Many of these files have been in the cowsay source code
> since 1999 (apparently), and at least since 2004, according to
> archive.org:
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20040404080800/http://www.nog.net/~tony/warez/cowsay.shtml

Thanks for sharing that.

I would like to point out that the situation is not static as the
ownership of trademark and copyright can change over time and the new
owners may choose to behave differently.

A directly relevant example is the Star Wars cowsay
files. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars> says that Lucasfilm
Ltd. the owners of the Star Wars franchise was acquired by Disney.