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

[Robert Kern]

On 2014-05-17 13:07, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sat, 17 May 2014 09:57:06 +0100, Robert Kern wrote:
>
>> On 2014-05-17 02:07, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> There is such a thing as the public domain in the US, and there are
>> works in it, but there isn't really such a thing as "placing a work"
>> there voluntarily, as Grant says. A work either is or isn't in the
>> public domain. The author has no choice in the matter.
>
> That's incorrect.
>
> http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html

Thanks for the link. While it has not really changed my opinion (as discussed at 
length in my other reply), I did not know that the 9th Circuit had formalized 
the "overt act" test in their civil procedure rules, so there is at least one 
jurisdiction in the US that does currently work like this. None of the others 
do, to my knowledge, and this is the product of judicial common law, not 
statutory law, so it's still pretty shaky.

-- 
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