A Little Linguistic Playground

I am playing/toying with a new word.

If one desires to put his/her work in the public domain, he has to write a statement to effectuate it such as "I put this essay in the public domain". This is fine for most people but the term "public domain" is not intuitive because it does not resemble the term "copyright" in any way. Therefore, I propose a new word called "decopyright". It means to deprive a work of the copyright.

I do not have immediate access to the unabridged Webster's Dictionary and Oxford English Dictionary. Those who do may want to do us a favor by looking them up for the word "decopyright".

Several examples of the usage on the word:

     I decopyright this essay.

(A librarian speaking to a patron.) Several decopyrighted books
     have arrived yesterday and you may want to borrow them today.

(On the copyright page inside a book)

               Copyright 1999 by John Smith
              Decopyright 2005 by John Smith

     Unless it is decopyrighted, you have to ask the author for 
     permission.

     My friend sometimes is a decopyrighter.

     Anything that is copyrightable is also decopyrightable.

I did a brief search at http://www.dejanews.com/ and found that there was a post using the word "decopyright". http://www.nlsearch.com/ and http://www.altavista.digital.com/ also yielded several results but all of them are in French and German languages. I do not know what "decopyright" would mean in these languages.

Well, what do you think?

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>

P.S. For whatever it's worth, I decopyright this post (meaning that I put this in the public domain). Received on Thu Mar 11 1999 - 10:42:40 GMT