[message A] > Don't put anything in the public domain unless you *want* to let > other people copyright it themselves and deny you the right to use > it.
Not possible in theory; once a work is in the public domain, it stays there forever (absent change to copyright law, of course). This is not to say that the public domain work, modified by adding someone else's copyright notice, is not a copyrightable derived work (while that's not totally clear either, it's certainly not out of the question). In theory, nobody can prevent - at least not on copyright grounds - you from using a public domain work in any way you please, whether or not there exist closely related copyrighted works such as I sketched above. In practice, of course, you may need reasonably strong evidence that the public-domain version existed first, or at the will of the original copyright holder, if you need to defend against infringement charges. [message B] > I was thinking that there's only two ways to get a work into the > public domain, aside from starting there: > [...] > 2. author disclaims ownership. > In case #2, once the author has successfully disclaimed the work, > someone else could claim ownership of it. Sure, and I could claim ownership of gEDA, too. Claiming is nothing; it's being able to make such claims stick that matters, and that would be rather difficult if there's reasonable evidence that the PD version truly is PD. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list geda-dev@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
