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Debatable

Ed Burnette 16th Jun 2006

Thanks for the reference. It looks like there's disagreement about whether or not "public domain" is legally meaningful (see for example http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/) but even for lawyers this seems like splitting hairs. If it's clear what the intent of the author is, then it would be difficult to imagine a judge or jury finding against that. Most of the weird cases they're talking about are times where a work accidentally went into the public domain and then the author or their estate tried to correct that mistake. But if you're really worried about that then an MIT/BSD style license could be used. I just think it's overkill, but I'm not a lawyer (thank goodness!).