Re: [docbook] sample docbook documents in the public domain?

[Alex Russell <alex@netWindows.org>]

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On Wednesday 23 April 2003 02:29 am, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> Most are *not* in the public domain. (At least in the European Union,
> the author needs to be dead for at least 70 years - a difficult
> requirment for a DocBook document.)

US copyright laws also assign implicit copyright rights, even to authors 
that do not declare their copyright. There is also debate among legal 
experts as to whether or not authors (again, in the US) can declare their 
works to be public domain. At best, it is ambiguious. The documents from 
Project Gutenberg would be a good start, however I don't beleive they're 
already marked up in DocBook.

All told, the public domain has been under concerted attack for a couple of 
decades. I suspect that the closest the poster will come to public-domain 
terms of use (or at least, unambiguious, widely accessable terms) will be 
the posted documents which fall under the various Free documentation 
licenses.

- -- 
Alex Russell
alex@netWindows.org
alex@SecurePipe.com
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