[aur-general] license convention for public domain packages

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Aaron Griffin<aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Paulo Matias<matias at archlinux-br.org> wrote:
>> I'd not agree here. Isn't public domain exactly the absence of a
>> license? When something is public domain you have no obligations at
>> all. Even citing the author's name isn't required. You can do what you
>> want with a public domain work.
>>
>> So I can't see why should we require to ship a different public domain
>> declaration for each public domain package. I think something like
>> 'none' or 'PD' without the obligation to install anything to
>> /usr/share/licenses would be the best way to go here.
>
> This is very very not true. There is no such thing as "public domain".
> Any code I write, without otherwise noting it, is copyrighted to me in
> the US and copying of it is not allowed under standard copyright laws
> unless I explicitly say otherwise. That's the funny thing - copyright
> actually protects the original author _by default_. Even more to the
> point, there is no way to willfully give up implicit rules such as
> this across the globe.
>
> Check out the FAQ here: http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/

More complete info on wikipedia, as always:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#No_legal_restriction_on_use