[Neurodebian-devel] experimental OpenVibe package

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On 08/08/2012 06:21 PM, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 08 Aug 2012, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
>>> kinda but also -- does it claim absent responsibility for all the harm
>>> and suffering this software might cause???  that is why all the licenses
>>> have disclaimers (and thus it is important to have such a license), and
>>> only US government is allowed to "deposit" into public domain
>>> AFAIK ;)
> 
>> Not only the US government -- US citizens too.
> 
> are you sure?
> my uneducated reference regarding government is
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Government_works
> Is there any reference for US citizens?
Well, that paragraph only says that US government output is non
copyrighted by law. So it lands in the public domain, which is pretty
much what I was saying.

And the whole WP article is written from the perspective of Common Law
countries, where the public domain has been present for two or three
centuries. So once you declare that you forfeit your copyright, you're
done. The problem is countries where the term (like Poland) where the
term "public domain" doesn't exist in the law _at all_. Then the best
you can do is to declare that the unavoidable rights will not be
exercised, which is what CC-0 does.

Zbyszek

>> Actually the US is doing
>> fine here, and the problem is the result of the world, where "public
>> domain" is not properly defined by the law. E.g. under Polish law
>> and in some other countries (France?) authors have "moral rights" which
>> they cannot wave away. For *portability* it's better to use a license,
>> e.g. CC-0.
> 
> thanks for the precious bits of clarifications ;)