Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
You are entirely free to place your work into the public domain if you wish, or to release it under a Creative Commons licence. If your readers are "suffering" as a result of copyright law, you can do something about it.
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It's not entirely clear that a person *can* place works into the public domain; there's no legal mechanism for doing so, at least in the US. Certainly, there is no way to say, "I maintain copyright of this for 25 years, at which point I'll decide if I wish to extend it for another 25 years, after which it's released into the public domain."
So far, declarations of "I put this in the public domain" have been taken as "copy at will"--but none of those have been challenged in court. (Presumably, the author wouldn't challenge it, but his heirs might.)