On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 05:55:36PM +0300, Sami Liedes wrote:
The relevant US law says (title 17, chapter 1, § 105):
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work
of the United States Government, but the United States Government
is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred
to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
This certainly seems to make the works effectively PD in the US;
however it almost seems as if that was carefully worded to _not_ place
works in the PD, only to make the US government unable to enforce
their copyright under the US law.
I think this is drawing a distinction between government works and works
received by the government from elsewhere.