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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

Excellent work .. and of course, a salient reminder of why we all, individually, should copyright our own works, even if it is something done for free and/or for volunteer basis with no commercial interest. A right not exercised is one lost.

I think its preposterous that someone is able to trademark a word list. I bet its not even complete.

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All works that can be copyrighted are automatically copyrighted from the moment of creation, unless you live in one of the dozen countries which haven't ratified neither the Berne Convention nor TRIPS. The US signed Berne in '89, by the way.

This is actually a better argument for copyleft licensing for any community effort like this. It would not have been possible for any company to lock down the efforts of this community if all contributions to the wordlist at question had been under a license like Creative Commons or the GPL.

What's your source for being able to trademark a word list?

Sick system. In other developed countries you have copyright if you do it. You don´t need to register that right anywhere. Of course more difficult to prove but thats another story...

When I found out you had to register your stuff for copyright in certain countries, I was actually surprised ... I just thought having copyright for your work by default was normal.

I believe it's normal in all countries that are signatories to the Berne Convention, which is... apparently ~160 of the ~190 UN member states.

In the US you don't have to register anything either.

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