Re: PDF files and dh_compress
Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org> writes:
> As for the public domain, I thought I was on solid ground because work
> made by public servants in the USA is automatically public domain.
> However, I realised that the Standford university where the software has
> been released is private (correct me if I am wrong), thus the program
> can not be in public domain.
Stanford University is indeed a private institution and the copyright of
works for hire for Stanford University vests in the Board of Trustees.
However, Stanford is generally fairly good about using reasonable
licenses, at least after a bit of prompting.
Note that copyright even for public educational institutions is more
complex than that. The copyright on BSD, for example, is still held by
the board of trustees of the University of California; it isn't public
domain, even though that's a public institution. In practice, the rules
that say that work done by the government is automatically public domain
are undermined by enough special cases that it's best not to rely on them
without an explicit statement.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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