In article s.com,
DoN. Nichols wrote:
According to Brooks Moses :
Dan wrote:
On Sat 21 Jan 2006 07:20:56p, "R.H." wrote in
:
Thanks, looks like you nailed this one, it appears to be the same
piece of hardware, if you don't mind I'll post one of the photos on my
site.

Oh sure. I'm pretty sure just posting them to abpw puts them in
the public
domain :-) but you have my permission to use either of them as you like.

Nope, it most definitely doesn't put them in the public domain! People
tend to act like it does sometimes, but that's only the "they won't find
out so they won't sue me" sort of public domain.

(Well, sometimes it's more the "they probably don't mind, so they won't
sue me" sort of public domain, as in this case, I suppose.)

Well ... if the photos are your *own* work, and you post them to
an alt.binaries newsgroup with no restrictive notices, that is pretty
much equivalent to putting them in the public domain.

FALSE TO FACT. 'once upon a time', (in the U.S.) it was true that if
you 'published' something *without* a copyright claim attached, that the
item was then in the public domain. Since the U.S adopted the "Berne
Convention", and modified it's copyright laws accordingly (in the 1980's),
this is no longer the case.

Copyright protection attaches *automatically*, with no need to ever
include any notice of such. If you don't _know_ the item is in the
public domain -- i.e. you have a disclaimer from the author to that
effect -- you are well-advised to proceed on the basis that there *is*
copyright on the work involved.


However -- if you *don't* own the rights, that is a different
matter. It is copyright infringement in aid of more copyright
infringement. :-)