On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 10:54:16PM -0500, Simetrical wrote:
On 11/14/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
No, but it *is* still possible to dedicate original material to the public domain, is it not?
Maybe. The courts haven't tested it. In law, "public domain" is where stuff goes when its copyright expires, and under some other circumstances; nothing explicitly says you can put stuff there. Thus in proper legalese, you normally say something closer to "I grant an irrevocable, unconditional, duty-free license to everyone in the world to use, modify, redistribute, and otherwise do whatever they want with my work."
Or something to that effect. I may have confused some of the details a bit. The issue is discussed on [[public domain]], I think.
It is, where it says:
It is commonly believed by non-lawyers that it is impossible to put a work into the public domain. Although copyright law generally does not provide any statutory means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain, this does not mean that it is impossible or even difficult, only that the law is somewhat unclear. Congress may not have felt it necessary to codify this part of the law, because abandoning property (like a tract of land) to the public domain has traditionally been a matter of judge-made law, rather than statute. (Alternatively, because copyright has traditionally been seen as a valuable right, one which required registration to achieve, it would not have made sense to contemplate someone abandoning it in 1976 and 1988.)
which hews pretty closely to what you assert.
But you're correct; the appropriate CC license has the same or better effect, and is clear, legally.
Cheers, -- jra