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Ray Saintonge wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
My point was that Mark does not understand the language of debate, his clear poisoning the well attack here is an excellent example of it.
Since I have not been participating in this thread, I'm not sure to what you mean to refer. Your previous argument in this thread was with Ray Saintonge, not with me.
Fantastic! ... and I thought I was arguing with Jean-Baptiste Soufron. I suppose if I worked hard at it I could make a distinction between "explicitly" and "specifically", but the former may indeed be a superior choice.
The question that set us off in this direction was whether someone had the right to put his work into the public domain. I maintain that he does. To put this in terms of the distinction between "malum prohibitum" and "malum in se" is absurd in the absence of a "malum" of any kind in such an act. Is Stirling proposing that someone should be fined for putting his writings in the public domain?
Ec
Since I seem to kill every thread I post to, I'll end this one.
I used {{MultiLicenseMinorPD}} until about 2 days ago, when I say the following on it's talk page:
Because it's actually legally impossible to grant one's own works into the public domain in the U.S. and U.K., and this creates serious potential legal problems, I will deprecate this tag if there is no dissent for 4 days. Please see [[Wikipedia:You can't grant your work into the public domain]] for a full explanation along with some authoritative sources, including the U.S. Copyright Office. I have created the tags {{TextLicenseMinorFreeUse}}, which reflects the intent of this template. [[User:Dcoetzee|Deco]] 03:34, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As I read it (IANAL), you can't place your work into the public domain because:
Any work receives copyright by default and copyright law generally doesn't provide any special means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain
and
Some claim that under many jurisdictions, a statement absolving a copyright or "granting" a work into the public domain has no legal effect whatsoever, and that the owner still retains all rights to the work not otherwise released. This person would then have the legal right to prosecute people who use the work under the false impression that it was in the public domain. It is certainly true that under some jurisdictions, it is impossible to release moral rights, though that is not the case in the United States.
(From [[Wikipedia:Granting work into the public domain]] and [[Public domain]])
*However*, you /can/ release things under a free-for-any-use licence, like {{CopyrightedFreeUse}}, {{NoRightsReserved}}, {{cc-sa}}, etc.
(Hopes flame war will end now)
- -- Alphax GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis