* Alexander Reichle-Schmehl alexander@schmehl.info [100211 14:59]:
Please help me understand and respond to his concerns, particularly from the standpoint of European or German copyright.
Could it be, that he confuses that with "public domain"? TTBOMK many Europeans (at least Germans) can't legally refrain from the rights on their works and put something under "public domain".
Translating legal terms like that does not make much sense. There is no copyright in Germany, no public domain, no licenses, nor any other English term. There are also other legal concepts, but that is not a bigger difference than with other term: translating things word by word just produces gibberish.
So while "Man kann sein Werk nicht gemeinfrei machen." might be a correct (though already in German very formal hair splitting) German sentence that could be correctly translated in some sense to "You cannot place your work in the public domain", that does not mean that you cannot place your work in the public domain.
In the same way one could "mis"translate that you cannot sell copyrights in Germany and still people doing it effectively all the time.
Hochachtungsvoll, Bernhard R. Link
P.S: I don't think that any insight in Germany can help you understand the original mail. It sounds more like the mail of an U.S. citizen asking for a license of a software because the GPL does not apply to him because he is not member of the communist party. (Or any other equally absurd non-sequitur).