[Gambas-user] The Gambas Book

[Rob Kudla]

On Sat September 17 2005 16:31, John Rittinghouse wrote:
> As an aside, and for general interest, material, any material,
> copyrighted or not, that is placed in the public domain can be used

I know you meant well with this, but "copyrighted" and "public domain" 
are mutually exclusive terms.  Placing something into the public 
domain means disclaiming any copyright or other proprietary right the 
author had on the work.  And in Berne Convention countries at least, 
it must be done explicitly, except when a work's copyright expires 
(which currently means the work was created in 1923 or earlier, and 
that its author died more than 70 years ago.)

While I think most of us who've contributed to the Gambas wiki and 
thus the Gambas documentation did so intending for it to be spread 
far and wide along with Gambas itself, all the entries are explicitly 
copyrighted by the author(s) who created them, using the notice I 
mentioned in my last post.  This could even create problems with the 
distribution of Gambas, though I can't imagine that happening, and as 
you've already seen, can create problems for those of us who'd want 
to incorporate some of that documentation into a book.

> for any purpose as long as it is properly cited and referenced and
> credit is given where appropriate (WIPO rules, not mine).  I have

Once a work is in the public domain, you don't need to cite or 
reference or credit anything or anyone, because no one owns it 
anymore.  It's not a well-regarded practice to claim public domain 
works as your own, but people incorporate parts of them all the time.

However, if an author still holds copyright on a work, and hasn't 
spelled out terms under which people may automatically use that work, 
the terms are "all rights reserved".  This limits our use of the 
material to the level of fair use.... quotations and attributed 
excerpts are fine, but wholesale copying will get us into trouble if 
someone has a problem with it.  I have to think that all the Gambas 
contributors being from different countries will only complicate 
matters.

To correct a common fallacy (that you yourself haven't used), anything 
covered by the GPL is not public domain, as the mechanism for 
enforcing the GPL is a copyright.

See the wikipedia entry on public domain for more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

Rob