If you PD it, what you're actually doing is disclaiming all rights to
it, and someone else can then claim ownership of it and GPL it, and
then *you* can't use it your way any more either.
Interesting -- has this been proven in court, where the existance of
prior art in a field, known to be public domain, has ever had that
public domain status rescinded by another?
IANAL
But, being public domain doesn't grant another to take the idea and slap an
arbitrary licence of their own upon it. I believe once a creative work has been
converted to public domain their it rests. What one can do is take a public
domian thing and enhance it and make the derivative non-public but the original
is still public.
For example, If you took the king james bible and added pictures to it you
could copyright your illustrated king james bible but you could not copyright
the text of the king james bible. Your version is yours but the world is free
to use the original.
Steve Meier
