Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

Gottfried Hofmann said:
>
>> There are different issues with different forms of expression in how
>> practical it is to extract a PD portion of a work.  In a painting, this
>> might be easy, less so with an audio recording, lesser still with a
>> computer program.  Yet all of these are copyrightable works.  And, of
>> course, the CC organization doesn't recommend their copyright licenses
>> for computer programs.
>
>
> Isn't it commmon among programmers to use public domain code in GPLed
> programs (which means the public domain code will be relicensed to GPL
> in that case)?

technically, no computer code has become public domain yet.
Some programmers release their code under a license that
gives away 99.9% of the rights (BSD license, etc).
But the only way for something to be truly "public domain"
is for the copyright term to expire. (or if the code was written
before the 70's to have been published without registration or
a copyright notice. Now, copyright is automatic and impossible
to switch off.




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