Errata in 'Dissecting the Unlicense'

[Marius Kempe]

Hi,

I love the Unlicense and have started using it for my small scientific
projects. I noticed one piece of errata in 'Dissecting the
Unlicense' (http://ar.to/2010/01/dissecting-the-unlicense) that I
think is misleading and needs to be fixed:

in section §2, 'The Freedoms', one reads:

> So, yes, you are perfectly welcome to incorporate the code into proprietary software. Yes, you can relicense the code
> under any license you please. No, you don't need to include any original copyright statements (there are none) or a copy
> of the Unlicense. No, you don't need to give attribution to the original authors -- though as a matter of common courtesy
> you probably should be doing so!

I don't think that you can, in general, legally relicense code, or any
content, that has been put into the public domain, because this
implies you are claiming copyright over it. This makes it copyfraud.
As evidence I submit the Wikipedia entry on copyfraud -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/copyfraud - and this article by a legal
scholar, pointing out how common copyfraud is today and arguing that
it is a major problem: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=787244

So I would advocate changing this line ASAP.

Best,
Marius

PS. I am not a lawyer.