<<I will admit that a literal reading of the definition of PI seems
to indicate this is the case.>>
My literal reading of the PI definition says to declare PI it must be ownable and you must own it. Meaning you can't declare public domain stuff per se.
<<Really, it seems that either the definition of PI would be changed to
disallow claiming public domain materials as PI>>
It already disallows it. It requires OWNERSHIP for declaration.
Now, I will agree that the wording of the sentence with the ownership declaration requirements is so poorly punctuated that there is a way to read it such that you have to declare nothing except trademarks and registered trademarks and that all other things are automatically PI. However, this is an extremely labored reading of the document. If some things were automatically PI whether you liked it or not you could never declare them as OGC. It is the declaration process that sifts OGC from PI. It would also be illogical to have to formally declare trademarks and registered trademarks for protection (things you would nominally pretty much want protected 100% of the time), but things which many people want to give away would have to automatically be protected. I therefore think this alternate reading of the PI sentence is extremely labored and I view the PI declaration clause requiring ownership to apply to ALL PI, and saying that ALL PI must be declared and be owned by the declarer. I think that is the only logical reading that is consistent with the clear intent of the license, and that reading does NOT allow for PI declaration of public domain stuff.
The only case where you can PI declare public domain stuff is in the form of creatively chosen collections of materials. For example, let's say you went out and scanned lots of books from the 1800s for all the art from your book. You can't copyright individual images (they are public domain), but you CAN copyright a larger collection of them, preventing people from reprinting your collection of images as is. This would NOT prevent people from borrowing one or two of the images, as you cannot claim copyright over them, and therefore your PI claim probably only extends to the intellectual property to the degree that you can declare ownership over it.
Lee
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