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List:       lilypond-user
Subject:    Re: public domain and licenses (was: Musicology with Lilypond)
From:       Henning Hraban Ramm <lilypondml () fiee ! net>
Date:       2019-10-29 20:54:44
Message-ID: D0766D50-00AF-4697-B9FE-985F1D31ECB0 () fiee ! net
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> Am 2019-10-29 um 20:11 schrieb mason@masonhock.com:
> 
> 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
---
fiëé visuëlle
Henning Hraban Ramm
https://www.fiee.net


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