On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 6:07 AM John Cowan <co...@ccil.org> wrote: > Well, that pretty much reflects the law: U.S. government employee work > product *is* in the public domain in the U.S., and *isn't* in the public > domain in other countries unless the foreign law makes it so. >
I want to see the United States Government go to court in some other country to protect a copyright that it would not honor in its own courts. I don't think that would go far. And of course there isn't much real value to protect. This is after all supposed to be Open Source software. > > Speculation: the "law of the shorter term" which many countries have (but > the U.S. does not) might treat U.S. government employee works as having a > copyright term of 0 years, meaning that in such countries the copyright > term would also be 0 years. But whether "not copyrighted in the first > place" is the same as "copyrighted for 0 years" for such purposes is a > question. > I think the proper handling of this sort of work is for the US to abandon such tenuous and probably unenforceable rights, in the interest of clarity.
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