Re: NEC Licence (Work of US Gov. Employees)
John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> wrote:
> > There's plenty of examples where a public domain work was relicensed and
> > sold for a lot of money.
>
> And those who paid that money can extract the PD work and distribute copies
> with impunity no matter how the seller "relicensed" it.
Only if they can do the extraction (can identify the changes). This can
be rather hard if we're talking about a binary which was derived from PD
information -- you might not even know that part of it was PD.
Of course, since we're discussing a potential Debian package, with clear
documentation on where the original source came from, as well as the
pristine unmodified sources kept intact, access should be pretty easy.
However, in this case, the issue is not "can we restrict distribution"
but "can we keep distribution from being restricted". And, since (a)
the actual copyright statement is somewhat loose and ambiguous and (b)
the U.S. Government will *not* take action against a U.S. citizen who
slaps another copyright on the work, I think the idea is plausible.
--
Raul
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