IANAL either, but there exist legal tools like CC0 [1] for releasing your work into the public domain or, barring that, waiving as many rights to it as possible

IANAL either, but there exist legal tools like CC0 [1] for releasing your work into the public domain or, barring that, waiving as many rights to it as possible. That said, even the FAQ for CC0 [2] carries the following notice: "Please don’t take the 0 (zero) in the name “CC0” literally – no legal instrument can ever eliminate all copyright interests in a work in every jurisdiction. CC0 doesn’t affect two very important categories of copyright and related rights. First, just like our licenses, CC0 does not affect other persons’s rights in the work or in how it is used, such as publicity or privacy rights. Second, the laws of some jurisdictions don’t allow authors and copyright owners to waive all of their own rights, such as moral rights. When the waiver doesn’t work for any reason CC0 acts as a free public license replicating much of intended effect of the waiver, although sometimes even licensing those rights isn’t effective. It varies jurisdiction by jurisdiction. While we can't be certain that all copyright and related rights will indeed be surrendered everywhere, we are confident that CC0 lets you sever the legal ties between you and your work to the greatest extent legally permissible." [1] See https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. Incidentally, this license was developed by a US non-profit, so it's reasonable to expect them to have paid special attention to it working with the US copyright law. [2] http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ/ http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ/