Re: public domain and licenses (was: Musicology with Lilypond)

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

> Am 2019-10-29 um 20:11 schrieb address@hidden:
> 
> On 10/29, Urs Liska wrote:
>> Well, the LSR website explicitly states that it's contents is in the
>> public domain. If I read correctly your email this would have to be
>> considered illegal, especially given that many snippets there are
>> uploaded not by their original authors but by someone who uses the
>> results of a mailing list discussion 
> 
> Like Andrew B says, it would probably take an international copyright
> lawyer to really sort out the legal status of the LSR.  Saying that
> something is public domain doesn't just make it so.  My understanding is
> that unless the copyright has expired or the work has otherwise entered
> the public domain, all rights are exclusively reserved until the author
> gives up those right.

As I said before, in the US (and probably some other legislations) you can give 
up copyright (i.e. your right of authorship) and put something into public 
domain. And if a sharing site states that sharing puts the contents into public 
domain, then that’s valid – for legislations where this is possible, assumed 
the contributor had the rights at all.

(We had a few cases where list participants posted copyrighted material, and of 
course they can’t put other people’s works into PD in any legislation.)

But you’re right that a juristically clarified and “waterproof” license like 
CC0 would have been better and more reliable that stating “public domain”. And 
we can’t just apply such a license to all the contents, all contributors and 
original authors would need to agree.

Thus, I share your conclusion.

Maybe we can declare for LSR and for our mailing lists that everyone puts their 
code under CC0 from now on, while older contents are still implicitely and 
unintendedly copyrighted, as long as it’s not declared differently?

Greetlings, Hraban
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fiëé visuëlle
Henning Hraban Ramm
https://www.fiee.net