Please add "Public Domain" to "license" list

[John Cowan]

Rick Moen scripsit:

> I learned not to trust on-line information about packages' licensing,
> including statements by software authors.  In order to weed out outright 
> proprietary packages, ones with licence conflicts, etc., I essentially
> had to do a licence audit of source code for every candidate package.

I'm not clear on how you did this.  Did you in every case contact every
author, and how did you know that you truly reached the author and not
another person of the same name?

> Once, a couple of
> decades back, one of the telcos attempted to bar other companies from
> republishing its Yellow Pages listings, claiming a compilation
> copyright over the arrangement of ads and telephone numbers.  It
> lost completely, because the court said putting together a telephone
> directory simply isn't a significantly creative act.

s/Yellow/White/.  Yellow Pages are definitely copyrightable and copyright.
AFAIK in the U.K. even the White Pages are copyrightable, though.

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan at ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_
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