No rights reserved

[David Croft]

David Johnson wrote:

> No, you are still retaining the copyright, as you explicitely state :-) And I 
> do not believe that "No rights reserved" is an appropriate legal statement. 
> 
> As I understand it,  in order to place something in the Public Domain, you 
> must legally sign away your right to the work, in a process that involves 
> paper documents and signatures. This is too much trouble for the average 
> developer, so it is rarely (if at all) done.


Assume that I want to retain copyright but surrender all of my 
exclusivity rights so that the work is effectively in the Public Domain 
without actually being so.  That is to say, there are no restrictions of 
any kind.


> But you can do the next best thing. Use the BSD, MIT or similar license. And 
> if even those are too wordy, then something on the order of "All persons are 
> permitted to use, copy, modify and distribute this work without restriction" 
> should be brief enough.


That's not bad but I worry that it might not grant some rights still 
held exclusively by the copyright holder.  Is there a catch-all 
statement that could be used in place of enumerating every possible 
permission?  What do you think of "All rights granted" as opposed to "No 
rights reserved"?



-- 
David Wallace Croft
(214) 533-3047 cell
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~croft