Re: gpstrans copyright

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Branden Robinson <branden@ecn.purdue.edu> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 13, 1999 at 08:08:48AM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote:

> > I concur. Once the author has said "public domain" he has promised not
> > to sue anybody over anything they do to the work; with the explicit
> > exception about removing the copyright notice.

> You can't do that.  If you state that something of yours is in the public
> domain, you have abandoned your claim of copyright.

This is theoretically right, but I think that there is a fair chance
that a court will decide to interpret a formally self-contradictory
copyright statement that says "This is public domain but you may not
do X" as if it was a license saying, "You may treat this as if is was
in the public domain, except you can't do X".

-- 
Henning Makholm