discuss: Re: review of unpublished source documents
Subject:
Re: RFC: review of unpublished source documents
From:
Rick Moen ####@####.####
Date:
25 Feb 2016 09:10:01 +0000
Message-Id: <20160225091105.GZ12323@linuxmafia.com>
Quoting Martin A. Brown ####@####.####
> Hello and good evening Rick,
Hi, Martin, and thank you for your comments. And thank you for pointing
out the somewhat sexist error of mine in assuming Machtelt was male.
My, the assumptions that creep in while we're not watching, eh? (And
I'm sure I'd caught myself making that error about 'Tille' in the past,
and then forgot.)
> Very good. I've made mental note of the above, specifically your
> point about documents in the public domain (that seems just weird).
It's indeed a weird and vexing problem. The fundamental explanation
is that some very powerful commercial interests have ensured that
copyright arises automatically (the Berne Convention treaty) and
persists because that is enormously profitable, and so there's a
built-in bias in the law, all around the world, to preserve that
abstract property.
Of course, material does go into public domain through expiration of
copyright (ignoring for a moment copyright term extensions passed every
time Disney is about to lose the first Mickey Mouse film), but there
are complications that can arise from attempting to make that happen
sooner through an act of will.
If you wish to see further exploration of this topic, I've put what I've
found on the subject here: 'Public Domain' on
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Licensing_and_Law/ .
Note on that page that you _can_ get the approximate effect desired from
a 'public domain dedication' using a one-line simple licence, like this:
Copyright (C) 2016 Owner Name. Do whatever you want with this work.
However, a long succession of people think that's not good enough and
think they can magick away the global copyright regime. (Because
litigation costs money and nobody sues without something valuable at
stake, there is scant caselaw about 'public domain dedications'.
Personally, I don't want me or my users to risk being a test case.)
