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

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 01:10:49PM -0400, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> 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.

I believe I am the counsel Tom is referring to, though the Fedora
policy conclusion Tom refers to was prepared by Tom. Nevertheless I
would see it as Fedora adopting more or less the liberal and pragmatic
view I have had on this subject for a long time. Since most of the
self-described "public domain" code we encounter is not actually under
CC0 (most of it is legacy code, in rarer cases it's whole packages
like SQLite), CC0 is not directly relevant. However (modulo that "or
patent" language :) CC0 approximates nicely the way I think we should
analyze the more typical kinds of simple public domain dedications we
encounter in FOSS code.

  - RF