Re: NEC Licence (Work of US Gov. Employees)

[Jonathan P Tomer <jpt@cif.rochester.edu>]

> It says that you can't enlarge the scope, etc. of any copyright
> protection in the prexisting material.
> 
> There is no copyright protection in the prexisting material, so I fail
> to see how that paragraph is relevant.

there is no copyright protection; therefore the scope of any existing
copyright is nothing, and you can not change that by instituting your own
copyright on an uncopyrighted work.

note though that this is unrelated to licence, in that i can take a work
that is in the public domain, make a verbatim copy, and put that copy under
shrinkwrap licence. a licence is a contract, and if i agree to the licence i
must abide by its terms. of course, if i were to discover that the work is
actually in the public domain, i could copy it anyway, and unless the
licence said something of the form "in exchange for the cardboard box this
work came in, i agree never to make a copy of the work in any way even
though it is in the public domain" nothing could be done about it.

--p.
"For a price I'd do about anything, except pull the trigger: for that I'd
need a pretty good cause" -- Queensryche, "Revolution Calling"
PGP 5.0 key (0xE024447449) at http://cif.rochester.edu/~jpt/pubkey.txt