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Under section 105 of the US Copyright Act, works produced by the US government are not entitled to domestic copyright protection and are therefore, essentially,
by natfriedman 16y ago
Under section 105 of the US Copyright Act, works produced by the US government are not entitled to domestic copyright protection and are therefore, essentially, public domain.
IANAL but we've been down this road with the license on the White House flickr feed.
Apparently this does not apply to contractors - which I find rather inconsistent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the...
Of course, whether the government actually publishes those works or not is an entirely separate question. So it's great to see this happening.
- protomyth 16y agoThe contractor clause is because of the military.
- dirkstoop 16y agoBut it sure comes in handy for other stuff. If the contractor clause is not applicable to this work even releasing it under the GPL is questionable, because that's most decidedly not the same as releasing it to the public domain.
- stilist 16y agoStill, it’s the sort of unforseen problem you want to have.
- jrockway 16y agoI'm not sure they have the choice about whether or not to GPL it. They are building on GPL'd code, which means their code must be GPL'd. Perhaps there's a formal way to say, "we won't go after you if you use our code against the terms of the GPL, but we can't control what Drupal does".
- protomyth 16y agoor they can't use GPL software because of the license.... They really need to obey the law and should have an actual statement about how this works.
- blasdel 16y agoBut they're derivative works of Drupal, which is GPLv2: http://drupal.org/licensing/faq http://drupal.org/licensing/faq
- jluxenberg 16y agoSo maybe that means they can't write code for Drupal?
- rlpb 16y ago> Under section 105 of the US Copyright Act, works produced by the US government are not entitled to domestic copyright protection and are therefore, essentially, public domain. What if the works are derivative of works licensed under the GPL?
- rbanffy 16y agoI would suppose the diff is public domain while the original retains its protection. Otherwise, every document produced by the US government derived from another document would put the original under public domain.