[License-discuss] Can copyrights be abandoned to the public domain?

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 08/14/2012 11:52 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> Fedora used to spend a lot of time stressing out over this question, but
> recently, after counsel with Red Hat Legal, we concluded that if someone
> is explicitly and clearly abandoning their copyright on a work (as in
> CC-0, for example), treating that work in good faith as being in the
> public domain presented a very minimal amount of risk, especially since
> such a declaration, were it to go to trial, would likely limit the
> effectiveness of the copyright "holder" suing for infringement.

CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode)
actually has an explicit license fallback in section 3, for cases where
the PD dedication fails.  I would be interested to hear if the counsel's
conclusion would hold without such fallback.

Matt Flaschen