DaleStan wrote:
michael blunck wrote:special "public domain" license (e.g. GPL et al.).
WHERE THE FLYING FSCK DO YOU GET THAT FROM? Since when is the
GPL public domain?
I didn´t write "public domain" but ""public domain"". But granted, to avoid confusion, I should have written ""public domain" or other "free" licenses" to make my point more clear.
The general problem seems to be the correct understanding of the term "public domain".
1. In fact, international copyright law (i.e. based on the
Berne Convention), doesn´t know a construct like the US´s "public domain". In international copyright law, works are either copyrightable (and thus such a work will be copyrighted automatically when being released) or they´re not (by various reasons). And only when a copyrighted work has expired, it´ll be free for being used by everyone, aka being in the "public domain".
2. In addition, most of the Berne Convention´s membership states don´t use the term "public domain" in their national legislation either. And because copyright under the Berne Convention and/or the signee states isn´t transferable at all (see e.g.
German UrhG §29), hence a "renouncement" of copyright, especially in favour of that unknown "public domain", isn´t possible. O/c, granting licences is always possible. But this is a different problem and has nothing to do with the question at hand (see original post).
3. In contrast, in the US, the term "public domain" is a legal term which is used synonymously for "non-copyrighted" and/or "non-copyrightable". This legal construct dates back from US copyright law before joining the Berne Convention (
1988) and applies to the fact that under national US copyright law, works w/o an explicit copyright statement were not enjoying copyright protection at all.
Now, for a work being "non-copyrightable" isn´t much of a problem in the end, either in US law or in legislation of other membership states. E.g., in US copyright law, see USC §105 (17), all works created by the US government (but not those of US states) are released into the "public domain", and German UrhG does the same in §5 (1),
explicitly stating that "laws, decrees, official enactments and declarations, as well as adjudications and official guidelines for adjudications don´t fall under copyright protection", i.e. are "non-copyrightable" by law and thus may be regarded as being in the "public domain".
(There are sublties though. Firstly, those works would be "non-copyrighted" in the US, but "non-copyrightable" in other member states, and secondly, US governmental works would be "public domain" only inside the US, but not abroad.)
O/c, this kind of being "public domain" doesn´t address the problem at hand.
The only remaining question is, if, in the US, there are "non-copyrighted" works from the outset (there are o/c non-copyrighted works because of copyright expiration), i.e. whether it´s possible to renounce copyright under US law.
The US Wikipedia has some interesting text with regards to that problem (US law):
Wikipedia wrote:Although copyright law generally does not provide any statutory means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain, this does not mean that it is impossible or even difficult, only that the law is somewhat unclear. Congress may not have felt it necessary to codify this part of the law, because abandoning property (like a tract of land) to the public domain has traditionally been a matter of common law, rather than statute. (Alternatively, because copyright has traditionally been seen as a valuable right, one which required registration to achieve, it would not have made sense to contemplate someone abandoning it in 1976 and 1988.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Copyright
Although there is support in the statutes for allowing work to be dedicated to the public domain, there cannot be an unlimited right to dedicate work to the public domain because of a quirk of U.S. copyright law which grants the author of a work the right to cancel "the exclusive or nonexclusive grant of a transfer or license of copyright or of any right under a copyright" thirty-five years later, unless the work was originally a work for hire.[
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_dom ... yright_Act
@planetmaker
You´re right.
regards
Michael