Everything you did not want to know about Unicode in Python 3

[Robert Kern]

On 2014-05-17 05:19, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info>:
>
>> On Fri, 16 May 2014 14:46:23 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>
>>> At least in the US, there doesn't seem to be such a thing as "placing
>>> a work into the public domain". The copyright holder can transfer
>>> ownershipt to soembody else, but there is no "public domain" to which
>>> ownership can be trasferred.
>>
>> That's factually incorrect. In the US, sufficiently old works, or works
>> of a certain age that were not explicitly registered for copyright, are
>> in the public domain. Under a wide range of circumstances, works created
>> by the federal government go immediately into the public domain.
>
> Steven, you're not disputing Grant. I am. The sole copyright holder can
> simply state: "this work is in the Public Domain," or: "all rights
> relinquished," or some such. Ultimately, everything is decided by the
> courts, of course.

One can state many things, but that doesn't mean they have legal effect. The US 
Code has provisions for how works become copyrighted automatically, how they 
leave copyright automatically at the end of specific time periods, how some 
works automatically enter the public domain on their creation (i.e. works of the 
US federal government), but has nothing at all for how a private creator can 
voluntarily place their work into the public domain when it would otherwise not 
be. It used to, but does not any more.

For a private individual to say about a work they just created that "this work 
is in the Public Domain" is, under US law, merely an erroneous statement of 
fact, not a speech act that effects a change in the legal status of the work. 
For another example of this distinction, saying "I am married" when I have not 
applied for, received, and solemnified a valid marriage license is just an 
erroneous statement of fact and does not make me legally married.

Relinquishing your rights can have some effect, but not all rights can be 
relinquished, and this is not the same as putting your work into the public 
domain. Among other things, your heirs can sometimes reclaim those rights in 
some circumstances if you are not careful (and if they are valuable enough to 
bother reclaiming).

If you wish to do something like this, I highly recommend (though IANAL and 
TINLA) using the CC0 Waiver from Creative Commons. It has thorough legalese for 
relinquishing all the rights that one can relinquish for the maximum terms that 
one can do so in as many jurisdictions as possible and acts as a license to 
use/distribute/etc. without restriction even if some rights cannot be 
relinquished. Even if US law were to change to provide for dedicating works to 
the public domain, I would probably still use the CC0 anyways to account for the 
high variability in how different jurisdictions around the world treat their own 
public domains.

   http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0
   http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ

Note how they distinguish the CC0 Waiver from their Public Domain Mark: the 
Public Domain Mark is just a label for things that are known to be free of 
copyright worldwide but does not make a work so. The CC0 *does* have an 
operative effect that is substantially similar to the work being in the public 
domain.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco