Russell McOrmond wrote: > On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Russell Nelson wrote: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > So Americans can ignore the civil-servant version of the NOSA license with > > > impunity, but not so Australians. [This was in response to my quoting from the Berne Convention to show that copyright in "other" Berne countries is independent from existence of copyright in the "home" country, as long as the work qualifies as protected matter under the BC. Apparently under US law works by the NASA may be public domain by law]
> > Interesting ... so what happens if an American citizen takes public > > domain US Government software into Australia and starts redistributing > > it there? But I suppose that's a problem that the NOSA will fix, so > > at least for this discussion it's a moot point. > > What if any US citizen took this work that is under the public domain > (for them) and applied a BSD (or any other) license and redistributed > worldwide? I don't think it is legal in the USA to apply your own license to a public domain work. How can you license something to which you do not have a copyright? Presumably creating a modified version or something would entitle you to a copyright to that version, but the 'bare' public domain work cannot be under copyright. > I think there is an interesting question being opened up by this > discussion. Given that term expiry is not the only way for a work to > enter the public domain, and term expiry can be different in different > countries (A Disney production gets 95 years in the USA but fortunately > only 50 years in Canada), are the other methods to enter into the public > domain also country specific? I think so. In fact it may be impossible for a work to truly enter the public domain in any other way. Most countries recognize the concept of 'moral rights' that are inalienable rights of the author and which cannot be transferred or given up. These rights permit the author to act against "mutilation" of his work, even when licensing it under an open source license, and also when saying "this work is in the public domain" or words to that effect. Arnoud -- Arnoud Engelfriet, Dutch patent attorney - Speaking only for myself Patents, copyright and IPR explained for techies: http://www.iusmentis.com/ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
