"Public Domain", he keeps using that term, I don't think it means what he thinks it means. It only sort of applies here. Something actually being Public Domain has extremely wide repercussions. A Public Domain work exists without any copyright or intellectual property laws applying to it, none.
For a work to be really Public Domain, only happens under a bunch of specific circumstances that really do not apply here (such as the copyright holder having been dead for a number of years).
You can't really slap a license on something and have it be Public Domain, because that means relinquishing any and all intellectual property rights related to the work. Including personal and moral rights. From Wikipedia:
> Few if any legal systems have a process for reliably donating works to the public domain. They may even prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights. An alternative is for copyright holders to issue a licence which irrevocably grants as many rights as possible to the general public, e.g., the CC0 licence from Creative Commons.
Note the last remark about Creative Commons' CC0 license. It's about the closest you can get to actually releasing your work to the Public Domain, worldwide (check the Creative Commons website for info about some legal hurdles why you can't "just release something to the Public Domain"). It's not something that happens by accident.
Now obviously the author doesn't have this particular specific meaning in mind, instead rather something else. Except, it would probably help the discussion a lot of he'd use the proper term and accurately defines what he is trying to say.
It seems to be some kind of confusion or collision between the (obviously and pretty straightforwardly copyrighted/licensed) actual written code he released under the BSD License, and his intellectual property rights over the (more nebulous concept of) the algorithm that is described in this code. I'm not at all sure if you can even obtain copyright over the latter. Actually no, I am pretty sure that you cannot. Copyright is very explicitly defined over a work, not an idea, and the work is the actual written code that was released under the BSD License.
For a work to be really Public Domain, only happens under a bunch of specific circumstances that really do not apply here (such as the copyright holder having been dead for a number of years).
You can't really slap a license on something and have it be Public Domain, because that means relinquishing any and all intellectual property rights related to the work. Including personal and moral rights. From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Dedicating_works...
> ## Dedicating works to the public domain
> Few if any legal systems have a process for reliably donating works to the public domain. They may even prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights. An alternative is for copyright holders to issue a licence which irrevocably grants as many rights as possible to the general public, e.g., the CC0 licence from Creative Commons.
Note the last remark about Creative Commons' CC0 license. It's about the closest you can get to actually releasing your work to the Public Domain, worldwide (check the Creative Commons website for info about some legal hurdles why you can't "just release something to the Public Domain"). It's not something that happens by accident.
Now obviously the author doesn't have this particular specific meaning in mind, instead rather something else. Except, it would probably help the discussion a lot of he'd use the proper term and accurately defines what he is trying to say.
It seems to be some kind of confusion or collision between the (obviously and pretty straightforwardly copyrighted/licensed) actual written code he released under the BSD License, and his intellectual property rights over the (more nebulous concept of) the algorithm that is described in this code. I'm not at all sure if you can even obtain copyright over the latter. Actually no, I am pretty sure that you cannot. Copyright is very explicitly defined over a work, not an idea, and the work is the actual written code that was released under the BSD License.