Aaron W. Hsu scripsit:

> What seems more suspicious, though I don't think legally problematic
> from the above wide permission, is to copy the document, and then claim
> copyright over it, and somehow incorporate it as a part of a significant
> commercial endeavor, without citing or referencing the original work and
> trying to pass the copy as your own work.

Except for the last point, this is definitely legally unproblematic,
given the license.  Explicitly *claiming* that you wrote every word of it,
and trying to prevent other people from doing so, would of course be Evil
and Wrong, not to mention illegal.  But a mere failure to acknowledge
the source, while certainly tacky, is legally permissible.

> Thus, I'm quite curious why the OP is using the particular language of
> "public domain" and "unrestricted" here in seeming opposition to what
> already exists in the document. Some clarification would help. :-)

In particular, dedications to the public domain are legally problematic
except in the Ninth Circuit (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho,
Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands).
Elsewhere in the U.S., not to mention the rest of the world, it isn't
clear that you can put something in the public domain just by saying
"I have abandoned the copyright" or indeed by any other means other than
the passage of time.

As such, then, licenses are much safer legally than public-domain
dedications.  The best known of these, the Creative Commons CC0, provides
a highly permissive license as a backup just in case the dedication is
legally ineffective.

I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.  But it is not the
unauthorized practice of law, either.

--
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
MEET US AT POINT ORANGE AT MIDNIGHT BRING YOUR DUCK OR PREPARE TO FACE WUGGUMS

_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
Scheme-reports@scheme-reports.org
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports