On 10/29, Urs Liska wrote: > Well, the LSR website explicitly states that it's contents is in the > public domain. If I read correctly your email this would have to be > considered illegal, especially given that many snippets there are > uploaded not by their original authors but by someone who uses the > results of a mailing list discussion
Like Andrew B says, it would probably take an international copyright lawyer to really sort out the legal status of the LSR. Saying that something is public domain doesn't just make it so. My understanding is that unless the copyright has expired or the work has otherwise entered the public domain, all rights are exclusively reserved until the author gives up those right. Unless LSR contributors agree to this at some point during the upload process, they reserve all rights to their code. Even if contributors are asked to release their work into the "public domain", that would be legally ambiguous. The purpose of CC0 is to resolve this ambiguity. If the intent is public domain-like status, contributors should be asked to release their work under CC0. Even then, if you are correct that many snippets were uploaded by someone other than the original author, then the uploaders don't even have the power to release the code under CC0 without permission from the author. > Is there anything that should be done about the LSR? Clarifying the unclear licensing terms retroactively would likely be such a large task that it is probably not worth attempting unless legal problems are likely to arise in practice, and since I'm sure that most snippet authors intended for their code to be free, I doubt that this will happen. Moving forward though, it would probably be good to ensure that for similar projects (such as OLL's snippets) contributions are clearly under free licenses (ideally GPL-compatible[1] ones, so that the snippets can be freely combined with Lilypond and/or Frescobaldi). [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
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