>>4693 >>4695 Copyright in basically every country lasts for several decades after the death of the author. Since Kathy has no children and has not established a estate, and it is unlikely that her parents or other inheritors would have bothered to manage her copyright holdings, her works would have been orphaned for the next 70 years in America, Britain, and Australia (50 years in Canada). By licensing her suicide note under CC-BY-SA 4.0, she made sure that it would not fall into legal limbo and people could share it freely by adhering to a very simple set of conditions. This was very thoughtful of her; I wish more people would have the common decency to release their works under a free license before they die.
As for attribution, that's a default term in all the Creative Commons licenses. They used to offer licenses without attribution but then they found out that 98% of creators requested the attribution clause, so they just stopped offering non-BY licenses.
