[conspire] Post Mortum legal explosion

[Rick Moen]

I inadvertently deleted my footnote before posting.  Here it is:

> It's reasonable to wish the scientific publications republished by JSTOR
> were free culture under, say, a Creative Commons licence (and I wish
> they would), but they are not.[1]  


[1] Some commentators have noticed that much of the scientific research
in question was funded by Federal dollars and asserted that therefore it
was inherently public domain.  That is, however, not the case.  Any work
created directly by a Federal department or agency passes directly into
the public domain (has no ownership title) as stated by 17 U.S.C. 105,
part of the Federal Copyright Act.  By contrast, nothing about Federal
support or funding, or even work done by outside entities under contract
to a part of the Federal government, imposes any special requirement
about copyright title or ownership.  You could wish that it would, but
the point is that it doesn't.