Peter Fairbrother scripsit: > Does the author actually "lose" copyright by abandonment? Lose ownership? > Lose the copyright itself? If so, what happens to it? Copyright exists by > statute until expiry, so afaict it can't just "disappear". > > Copyright is a legal, as opposed to a natural or equitable right, and every > text on rights I have read says that legal rights cannot be abandoned.
Say what? Every time I throw a piece of paper in the trash, my property right in the paper, which exists *in perpetuity* at common law, is abandoned, and the paper becomes *res nullius*, which anyone can appropriate. Copyright being a creature of statute and incorporeal, can't be appropriated like a piece of paper. So either abandonment is not possible, or it has the effect of dedicating the work to the public domain. -- Híggledy-pìggledy / XML programmers John Cowan Try to escape those / I-eighteen-N woes; http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Incontrovertibly / What we need more of is http://www.reutershealth.com Unicode weenies and / Fran)Bçois Yergeaus. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3