Copyright on the Python and Python-console icons?

[Tim Peters]

[Tim]
> Whether any entity in the US apart from the government can
> meaningfully put something in the public domain appears to have the legal
> answer "no", according to one US lawyer who researched the issue.
> Businesses and individuals supposedly can't disclaim copyright (the
> meaning of "public domain" -- nobody holds copyright) even if they want
to.

[Bengt Richter]
> I must confess to some confusion squaring this with the advice in PEP 001:
> ( http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0001.html )
>
> """
>     3. Copyright/public domain -- Each PEP must either be explicitly
>           labelled as placed in the public domain (see this PEP as an
>           example) or licensed under the Open Publication License[4].
> """
>
> and the notice at the bottom of PEP 001:
>
> """
> Copyright
>
>        This document has been placed in the public domain.
> """
>
> Is the issue that "placing something in the public domain" should not
> include a recursive deletion of the right to do so ;-)

It doesn't matter much to the process whether or not a copyright disclaimer
is legally sound -- the primary point of such pronouncements is to give
readers a clear declaration of the author's *intent*.  If a region's law
doesn't actually allow that intent to be realized, too bad, but it's of no
consequence unless it winds up in court.  Readers know what the author
intended regardless.  Paranoid authors are free to license their PEP under
the OPL instead, and paranoid PEP modifiers are free to run away from PEPs
that aren't under the OPL.  None of this matters to anyone in real life, of
course.