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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

First, I live and code in Germany, where you can’t place things into the public domain without already being dead for a long time.

Is that true? In Germany you're forbidden to make stuff and give it away?

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In Germany (and some other jurisdictions), you're forbidden to unilaterally disclaim responsibility for something you've written, which the public domain implies. Instead, you can only assert that there's no warranty (for example) via license (and/or contract, I guess?). Explicitly placing things in the public domain has a history in the US, but actually is not directly supported by law even there, only precedent.

There's a Google tech talk with Dr. D. Richard Hipp* (the primary author of SQLite), and he mentions that his decision to release SQLite under the public domain (for simplicity's sake) had surprising consequences -- in his words, the public domain doesn't exist for software in Europe, and several EU companies decided it would be prudent to pay a nominal fee in exchange for a custom, perpetual license from him.

IANAL, etc., but that's a lead if you want to investigate further. (He didn't specify what countries in Europe, but strongly implied it was the case throughout.)

* http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5160435487953918649

I think you can not give away the Copyright to things, but I am not sure if that has any practical implications, as Copyright is just one of many rights. Most contracts by publishers manage to get the rights to do with your stuff whatever they want anyway.

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