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Comment by ezequiel-garzon | Hacker News Reader

Why do you mention the notion of expiration? Wouldn't that apply instead to old (say, pre-1923) works?

If anything, I believe the author's very right of placing a (recent) work in the public domain is what is debated. Which... to me is beyond unfair and absurd, but may very well be "the law"...

An interesting example appears in SQLite's copyright page [1]. They acknowledge that, even though the code has been placed in the public domain, some legal teams may advise their companies to purchase a license.

[1] http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

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> An interesting example appears in SQLite's copyright page [1]. They acknowledge that, even though the code has been placed in the public domain, some legal teams may advise their companies to purchase a license.

This is very interesting. Can someone here please elaborate on it?

Although SQLite is supposed to be in the public domain, some jurisdictions don't recognize public domain, or some corporations might have legal teams that get very uncomfortable about the lack of an explicit license. In that case, you can pay $1,000 for a piece of paper that says you have the right to use SQLite. It keeps lawyers happy.

The legal trouble with public domain is the question "how did it get here?" In the case of expiry, that's simple: you can no longer assert control over the work- it's too old. In the case of a deliberate admission of release of copyright, how do you defend that? If, as a lame example, I take something that is public domain and claim it as my own work, how do you demonstrate that it's not? Because I'm not the original author? But that means that the author is still exerting some sort of implicit right, even if they don't pursue it themselves. This isn't a natural way of thinking about ownership, but it is a legal problem and so some organisations shy away from hard PD.

The fact that you are not the original author has nothing to do with the author exerting any control, it is a question of fact. Beethoven no longer exerts any control over the Moonlight Sonata and yet it is a fact that he wrote it and not you. Why should it be any different for a more recent work released to the public domain by the author?

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