The Register apparently ran a passionate but inaccurate article on the topic of grabby people claiming copyrights that don’t exist or which have run out. (Like, say, the Conan folks threatening legal action against the Broken Sea folks, who were only doing Conan stories in the public domain.) It called this “copyfraud”, which is a catchy name.
Apparently, Creative Commons got dragged into this, so here are their comments, with a link to the original article.
