Why?

[Jan Dockx]

On 30 Dec 2003, at 7:06h, Alex Rousskov wrote:

> On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, John Cowan wrote:
>
>> Alex Rousskov scripsit:
>>
>>> So far, it looks like to safely place something in public domain, one
>>> should not claim a priori ownership/authorship but simply anonymously
>>> release the thing into the wild. SourceForge, CreativeCommons, or
>>> somebody should offer such a service.
>>
>> Anonymous code is too dangerous: the true author, or his heirs, might
>> come back to bite you some day.  People who are reusing code need
>> to know the author and to know what the license is.
>
> The above works only for those users who believe the [legal] system is
> too screwed to rely upon or be afraid of, of course. Others should
> play the game (use licensed code and set up a legal defense fund). I
> am not advocating either belief system here.
>

Remember CSS Descramblers? <http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/>
This would be a way to put descrambler code in the public domain and 
get away with it?

BTW: at least in our jurisdiction (Belgium), part of the rights of the 
author (next to the copyrights and the rigth of fathership) is the 
right to distribute the work anonymously or under an alias. So you my 
have a point with the SF service.
Bit hard to do project follow-up though, …, although, with a array of 
machines in a cave on an island outside the Philippines ... :).

But to the point: AFAIK, anonymous is not the same as public domain; 
the authors rights are still in full effect when he decides to 
distribute anonymously or under an alias, at least here in Belgium (and 
so are his responsibilities, if he can be found). So whatever reasons 
we might have to use licenses over putting things in the public domain, 
they would still apply.


> Alex.
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