Wikipedia: Public domain/Talk

Showing revision 8

Rationale for the complete rewrite:

"The copyright or patent on the work has expired." The actual formula is max(1923, year of first publication + 96) in the U.S. and year of death + 71 in the E.U.

List items

I converted these to paragraphs because added detail made them too long for the purposes that <li> was designed to handle.

"The author or inventor explicitly disclaims any proprietary interest." Not necessarily. Some law experts believe that it's impossible for an author to put a copyrightable work into PD. (Anyone have a source for this?) Even then, it's still a really Bad Idea for an author to release a work into PD, as it fails to disclaim implied warranty and opens the author up to liability. Better to release it under a simple permissive license similar to the new BSD license.

--Damian Yerrick

As much as I happen to agree with the "monopoly" chant, repeating it over and over is clearly biased; I'm going to neutralize the wording a bit. --Lee Daniel Crocker

I didn't intend the word "monopoly" to show bias but used it merely to distinguish such artificial rights from birth rights. Calling such rights "intellectual property" sets up a false analogy with physical property that United States law (for example) does not recognize; it's a good thing you didn't bias it up the other way.

And the soft line breaks after sentences serve a purpose: they make the diffs much cleaner. --Damian Yerrick

Can we have an example other than Mark Twain?: one story of his wasn't published in his lifetime, and finally appeared in 2001, so it's still in copyright. --Vicki Rosenzweig