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Comment by ta76567656 | Hacker News Reader

I find it so strange that this is a problem... like the top legal minds of Germany can't figure out how to interpret the concept of public domain from another jurisdiction in a way that's consistent with German law? They can't just make a ruling that says, "OK, everyone consider public domain from other jurisdictions to be the most permissive possible license under German law" and be done with it?

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If I understand correctly, the issue is moral rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights). In some jurisdictions, including Germany, these rights cannot be waived.

For example, in such a jurisdiction, if I release a piece of code under a public domain equivalent license, you would have to give me credit as the author even if the license explicitly says you don't have to: the right to be identified as the author is a moral right that I cannot waive, legally.

Under Australian law public domain exists but only after the full copyright term expires. There's no legal mechanism for an author to relinquish their copyright over their works and dedicate it directly to the public domain.

Germany and France are not necessarily the cause of something like CC0, because even if all countries honored public domain as an alternative to copyright law, it's a concept that lives in a different legal dimension. Declaring that a work is in the public domain doesn't remove copyright---it assigns a different legal code to your work. Using CC0 does remove copyright, through its fantastic double-fallback causes (2) and (3), so only one legal system needs to be assumed for CC0 to work: copyright (which conveniently most countries follow since the Berne Convention.)

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