Re: Some licensing questions regarding celestia

[Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>]

Quoting Branden Robinson (branden@debian.org):

> Okay.  I mostly concur with Don Armstrong's challenges to this, but I
> have one more add.

IANAL, but, when I posted my analysis of the matter to the OSI
license-discuss mailing list, OSI general counsel Larry Rosen replied
"You've answered it beautifully.  Give this guy a law degree!"
(http://www.mail-archive.com/license-discuss@opensource.org/msg06191.html)

(Alas, that doesn't get me a law degree, but it means someone generally
considered a well-informed copyright lawyer thinks I was on-target.)

> In the U.S., copyrights are completely negotiable instruments.  That is,
> I can completely transfer my interest in them to another party (this is
> not so much the case in droit d'auteur jurisdisctions).
> 
> Surely anything that I can sell, or give away to another party under
> contract, I can abandon altogether.

Certainly you can abandon it.  But that does not cause the _title_ to
cease to exist.  Remember:  Public domain creative works are those whose
copyright title has either lapsed, become invalid (pre-1978), or were
non-copyrightable ab initio (e.g., creative works published or generated
directly by the Federal government).

There is a difference between a piece of property whose ownership is up
for grabs and one that has ceased to exist.  If it's not the latter,
then it's not public domain (by definition).

-- 
Cheers,             The shortest distance between two puns is a straightline.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com