[okfn-discuss] If my reports are "free, libre, open", can someone else claim they wrote them?

Puneet Kishor punk.kish at gmail.com
Sun Jul 14 19:24:35 UTC 2013


On Jul 13, 2013, at 10:07 PM, Aaron Wolf <wolftune at gmail.com> wrote:

> If we're going to be picky about this, the phrase "If you put an authored work into the public domain" is itself misleading as there is, at least in the U.S., no legal mechanism to actually place your work in the public domain (aside from dying and then waiting 70 years or working by contract for the government). The closest thing is CC0, which indeed waives all rights


Definitely use CC0 as it is a well recognized, effective tool. But, I am not sure if one can't place one's work in the PD in the US.

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1107173.html

> It is well settled that rights gained under the Copyright Act may be abandoned. But abandonment of a right must be manifested by some overt act indicating an intention to abandon that right.   See Hampton v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 279 F.2d 100, 104 (9th Cir.1960).

For more discussion, see http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html

Also note that SQLite, a rather well used software since it is baked into just about every mobile operating system, into Mac OS X (coredb) and several kajillion other software packages, has been placed into the PD by its author. Whether or not that has been done legally may be debatable. It has certainly been done quite successfully.

--
Puneet Kishor 

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