[WikiEN-l] Re: "releasing into the public domain"

Sat Apr 9 18:21:22 UTC 2005

I am very most certainly not a lawyer.

It seems to me any scenario in which there could be actual serious ugly 
monetary _trouble_ as a result of using something after the rights 
holder says "I release this into the public domain" must involve such 
an _extremely_ long chain of _extremely_ improbable circumstances that 
it can't possibly be worth worrying about.

I was planning to say that it was far more likely that we'd get into 
trouble for using that 14th century Image:Micky.jpg to illustrate our 
Mickey Mouse article. ("Your honor, in itself this image would not be 
under copyright, but when used to illustrate an article about Mickey it 
is clearly functioning as a derivative work of our copyrighted 
Mickey...")

However on checking out

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

I see that as I write this it is adorned with several _excellent_ 
likenesses of the "real" Mickey, images with helpful edit comments like 
"This is a screenshot of a copyrighted movie or television program. It 
is believed that screenshots may be exhibited on Wikipedia under the 
fair use provision of United States copyright law."

Even better, the leadoff portrait, Image:Mickeyhandships.gif, contains 
this useful image description

"Hey bros hows it hanging im jessica im 15 and i live in palmerston 
north i go to feilding high school collage which is a pretty good skool 
but skool sux write back love Jess  
jessicavanderlee at feildinghigh.school.nz"

Let's worry about REAL problems.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/