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Comment by SAI_Peregrinus | Hacker News Reader

It reserves all rights possible under copyright law. It then immediately grants some exceptions, in the form of a license. Failure to comply with the terms of the license brings the user into breach of contract, and it reverts to "all rights reserved". I don't think the "all rights reserved" part is necessary, since copyright in the US is automatic, but it doesn't change anything.

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It's a remnant of the Buenos Aires convention. Where if you didn't expressly reserve copyright, the work defaulted to public domain.

Because all the countries who signed that treaty didn't move to the Berne Convention right away, you had to still reserve your copyright or else lose it in those countries.

The last holdout signed the Berne Convention in 2000, so it's no longer an issue.

> It reserves all rights possible under copyright law.

Could you provide some source that corroborates this? Because my understanding is that this has no effect. It merely states something that is already true. That’s what I was hinting at with “possibly meaningless”.

It's a holdover from the time before the Berne convention where you needed to explicitly state what rights you were reserving when copyrighting a work. The US entered the Berne convention in 1988. Before that the Universal Copyright Convention (1952) was in force, which required a copyright notice and registration at the copyright office. Under the Berne convention (and the later WTO TRIPS agreement) neither of these things are required, so the entire "Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved." line is redundant. As you note, it merely states something that is already true. But it's become traditional to include something like that, often including the date, sometimes using the © symbol, etc.

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