On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Ben Finney <ben+deb...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > This is no guarantee against the author later realising they still hold > copyright, changing their mind on their generosity, and enforcing their > copyright on those who have violated that copyright. > > More significantly, it is no guarantee against *some other party* later > realising they have (by whatever means) obtained the original author's > copyrights, and deciding to enforce them. In other words, this > assumption fails the “Tentacles of Evil” test. > > Far better would be to convince the upstream that despite their > attempts, they still do hold copyright, and for them to explicitly grant > license under extremely-permissive terms like those of Expat > <URL:http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt>.
Whilst they might technically still hold copyright, I wonder if a court would consider a statement like 'Dedicated to the public domain' to be an all-permissive licence grant, given the common English meaning of the phrase. Probably hasn't been tested in court. -- Andrew Donnellan <>< andrew[at]donnellan[dot]name http://andrew.donnellan.name ajdlinux[at]gmail[dot]com http://linux.org.au subkeys.pgp.net 0x5D4C0C5 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
