[GRASS5] Re: [Fwd: whinging about GRASS again]

[Paul Kelly]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Mark P. Line wrote:

> A modern work is only in the public domain if the entity that currently
> owns the copyright to it places it in the public domain. After that
> happens, the entity is then the work's *former* copyright owner because it
> has relinguished copyright protection to the work by placing it in the
> public domain. This is what CERL was trying to do with its GRASS releases.

I read somewhere once and it suddenly made perfect sense to me: the whole 
point of having copyright on a work is to allow the author (or authoring 
entity) exclusive rights to sell it and make money out of it. It is an 
incentive to encourage creativity.

Since GRASS was created by the American government at taxpayers expense 
and for the public good of the country, copyright doesn't make sense
and wasn't claimed by CERL because there is no need for an incentive: it 
was created for the public good and is thus in the public domain.

Copyright only applies to computer source code in the sense that it is 
analogous to the text of a book---copy right cannot be applied to a binary 
software program. I hope this is right!

Paul