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As far as I can tell, the creators used the CC BY 4.0 license.
There's no restriction on commercial use, and no copyleft.
It's pretty close to releasing software under a BSD license, which is how Microsoft could sell BSD networking code as part of Windows.
So yeah, they infringed copyright by not including attribution, but once they fixed that, there's no further copyright issue here.

Unfortunately there is no Free Software license that distinguishes between human persons and corporate legal fiction "persons". I've been wondering what it would take to modify the GPL or BSD licenses to support this distinction in a way that would be upheld by the courts. Maybe call them HGPL and HBSD, the H standing for "human".

I bet there are clauses of Creative Commons licenses that do what you want. CC BY-NC-SA looks applicable, or possibly CC BY-NC-ND.

Copyright extensions in the U.S. seem to be finished.

I understand that all softwares have their purpose and the owner want to control how users are interfacing with it to limit the potential for abuse, but having a multi-pages terms and condition agreement document is something that realistically no one will read. Maybe there could be some way of summarizing the terms and condition in a format that is easier to understand at a glance? I'm pretty some parts are common, so maybe establish a kind of symbology to quickly inform the user what they are allowed to do, or what they're getting into? Kind of like how the Creative Commons license uses some symbols to quickly identify the license type used. https://creativecommons.org/li...

This raises a point to open-source style licenses for content, i.e. Creative Commons. Though there are restrictions to prevent using it for commercial purposes, AFAIK there's nothing against using a CC licensed song for, say, a promotional video for clubbing seals and eating babies.

Comboman made a good point above though, this can be translated into any situation - if you're a builder, your building may be used for 'bad things'. If you're an open source programmer, your code may be used for 'bad things'. You can't have total freedom along with restrictions based on your opinions or viewpoints.

There are two reasons to avoid the public domain, though they're largely been relaxed over time. The first is that most software licenses include an explicit disclaimer of liability. If you put something in the public domain then you are not providing that, so though you waive the right to sue over copyright infringement no one else waives the right to sue you. That said, I don't believe that there's been a single lawsuit over merchantability of public domain code, and I'd be surprised if one didn't get laughed out of court.

The other is that some jurisdictions either don't recognise that public domain exists, or recognise it only as the state into which works fall after the copyright expires. In particular, there's a lot of jurisdictional difference over moral rights, which either don't exist at all (much of the US - yes the US has bits of copyright law that vary from state to state), aren't transferrable / waivable, or are simply the same as other rights, so depending on the jurisdiction public domain work may still have strong attribution requirements.

The CC0 license avoids all of these issues and so is generally a better choice if you want to ensure that the rights that the recipient of your code has are the same that they'd have in a common interpretation of what public domain means.

Unlike typical Japanese media enterprises that exert their draconian copyright laws to squash usage of IP (including what Americans consider to be "fair use"), the creative forces that started Hatsune Miku put her design as part of the Creative Commons, thus freeing her design to amateur and professional artists alike for reuse. As a result, the original rights holder receive even greater recognition for their voice synthesizer software line from the artists creating all the derivative visual works involving her likeness.

If you haven't read Charles Stross' Lobsters, take some time this weekend to do yourself the favor.

All of Accelerando is available online under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License, but Lobsters can easily stand alone.

The open source movement includes not just programming but a general dedication to open content and the ability to share and modify that content. A classic example is Wikipedia. Bassel was particularly involved in things related to Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/2017/08/01/bassel/. This is all the same ethos. It is true that this sort of approach started with a focus on source code and programs but the movement is far larger than that.

it seems highly unlikely he would then go after people as the author in jurisdictions that don't recognize the public domain

The author might not, but with the current duration of copyright, are you sure about their heirs? If you want what people intend when they say public domain, look at the Creative Commons Zero license, which exists specifically to address these problems.

This whole "it isn't theft" argument is ultimately self-defeating because you'll kill off the flow of content. Nobody indie studio or director with a bunch of no-name actors and no real budget is going to reliably produce something equivalent to what a skilled director and actor with a $150 million budget could do.

And nothing of value would be lost.

More generally, the existence of everything from folk music, to anonymous graffiti, to Free Software, to anything released under a sufficiently free CC license proves that plenty of works would continue to be created even if copyright were greatly reduced in scope or even abolished entirely.

What right does she have to reuse someone else's copyrighted materials?

The videos were distributed on YouTube under the CC BY 4.0 license. It allows for commercial reuse, so long as the derivative work provide attribution. That's what gave her the right. It's the same reason this Slashvertisement for LBRY is happening, since they're using the fact that the videos were distributed under that license to redistribute them elsewhere.

I agree with everything else you said, however.

They should use the Creative Commons Zero copyright waiver, as it is designed for releasing copyright without regard to specific jurisdiction. The full legal text of the license (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode) contains both a copyright waiver and a fully-permissive license. This way, in case the copyright waiver is found legally unenforceable or invalid, the fully-permissive license kicks in and protects the Affirmer (person who applied the license to the work) and licensee (person using the work). (It protects the Affirmer by ensuring the work stays in the public domain (his successors can't have all rights to the work restored, as has happened in several cases before), and it protects the licensee from the same potential problem.

And they should have included the creative commons search page link from The Met press release.

If they would simply the crappy CC licenses....then more people would be able to use their content.

The alternative is returning to the old method of finding a contact for the content which normally involves a whois lookup and several phone calls, then hoping the entity is big enough to have licence terms drafted.

Having licenses named things like BY-NC-ND means you simply cannot use the content without doing research.

Ten seconds at Creative Commons Licences should be adequate research

Even then, it can still be impossible to use content because of morass of words in the mess that Lessig made the decision to create instead of just making something simple.

Morass of words!? CreativeCommons' most complicated licence weighs in at 87 lines. Microsoft's most basic licence for Win 10 Retail weighs in at 191 lines and only covers one product

We had to stop distributing CC learning materials since our lawyers couldn't guarantee that we wouldn't get sued since BY-SA isn't clear on what in the hell it requires.

Firstly, no lawyer, ever, can guarantee you won't get sued - regardless of which licencing scheme you are using. Secondly, if your lawyers can't decipher a BY-SA, then you need better lawyers. Thirdly, if it was true that the CC licence was an unreasonable risk, you knew who the creator was (BY) and could have simply contacted them for clarification or an alternative licence - as your lawyers should have.

Overall, you appear to be attempting a FUD campaign (or are a giant pansy). I publish and redistribute plenty of CC works without much difficulty in the interpretation of, or fear of, the associated words or pictures.

Something like http://creativecommons.org/cho... ?

Read your own link: attribution is required with the CC-BY license. The eBay seller was not providing any attribution to the creators of the designs, and when they were called out on it, they claimed that it was eBay's fault for not letting them post links. Moreover, not everyone was using the CC-BY license. Many of them were using the CC-BY-NC license that requires attribution and disallows commercial use, yet the eBay seller was both using those designs commercially and failing to provide attribution.

As I type this, the license link on the product's page leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use

I was wondering about that too. I thought perhaps I misunderstood the license or had missed something, but on the face of it, it seems like what they did was legal (perhaps a little sleazy, but still legal).

If someone more familiar with this could explain specifically what they did that was infringing or illegal, I'd be interested to know what it was.

The link points to a very short description of the license, and even that short description includes the following requirement:

        "Attribution â" You must give appropriate credit,
        "provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes
        were made."

They didn't do those things. Here's the actual license:
http://creativecommons.org/lic...

As I type this, the license link on the product's page leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use:

You are free to:

        Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

        Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

        The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?

You forgot the "Under the Following Terms" bit, which is the whole point!

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years

Explicitly disclaiming all subsequent renewals and extensions, I see. That was tried again later under the name Founders Copyright

Before you freak out, you should read the license that's been in place on Stack Overflow since it was founded.
Guess what: it requires attribution.
It's not totally clear how that's supposed to work when applied to code, but it's crystal clear about the requirement itself. The proposed MIT change is aimed at making this more obvious, but... If you aren't already giving credit where it's due, then that's on you - the license has always demanded that.
You might wanna read up on the "share alike" bit too...
P.S. I work for Stack Overflow.

This doesn't sound like open source is your real desire. It's totally possible to have a proprietary license with source provided to the customer.

You could gain some mindshare by using one of the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses, like Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
(CC BY-NC-ND) or Attribution-NoDerivs
(CC BY-ND).

You could use something very similar to the pre-2007 qmail license. It allows people to download and use it. They can make any changes locally. They can redistribute the pristine sources or binaries made from them to others. They can't distribute their alterations. They can distribute patches against the pristine sources, but they can't call those part of the product.

The OSI has a whole list of licenses. I'd bet not one of these meets your requirements. You really shouldn't be saying it's "open source" unless you're using an OSI-approved license.

Software licensing is a legal issue. The people you really want to be talking to about what license language meets your exact needs in light of the laws where you operate are lawyers. More specifically, you want probably want people versed in both copyright and contract law to look into this.

This doesn't sound like open source is your real desire. It's totally possible to have a proprietary license with source provided to the customer.

You could gain some mindshare by using one of the more restrictive Creative Commons licenses, like Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
(CC BY-NC-ND) or Attribution-NoDerivs
(CC BY-ND).

You could use something very similar to the pre-2007 qmail license. It allows people to download and use it. They can make any changes locally. They can redistribute the pristine sources or binaries made from them to others. They can't distribute their alterations. They can distribute patches against the pristine sources, but they can't call those part of the product.

The OSI has a whole list of licenses. I'd bet not one of these meets your requirements. You really shouldn't be saying it's "open source" unless you're using an OSI-approved license.

Software licensing is a legal issue. The people you really want to be talking to about what license language meets your exact needs in light of the laws where you operate are lawyers. More specifically, you want probably want people versed in both copyright and contract law to look into this.

If they do that and suddenly a cover of one of their songs breaks through, they won't see a penny of it.

This is false. The CC BY 4.0 International license *requires* any derivative works, covers, etc. to attribute the original artist. Not attributing the original artist is basis for legal action. This ensures whoever did the hard work creating the song someone else may be covering gets their spotlight as well. For example, people who hear a cover by some famous person will likely want to check out the original song. This is exposure. Exposure is the first step in someone becoming a fan and purchasing your music.

Creative Commons licensing doesn't take away copyright from the rightful owner(s). It enhances their potential for distribution in the digital age.

IANAL.

Legal departments already know how to deal with that (I've signed something at every new job promising I wouldn't do that, as a condition of employment), and it's obviously the wrong thing to do. Open source code is right there when you google for a solution to the problem in front of you, and it's often fine to incorporate. Quick, what license is the code you find on Stack Overflow under? OK to copy into commercial code or not?

p.s., probably not

The better long term solution is:

* open source software
* Creative Commons License

You can't pirate what you are legally allowed to share. :-)

Creative Commons share, alter, no sell

Creative commons doesn't have any of those license terms! Even the GGJ FAQ uses those imprecise terms to refer to what is actually a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. And they reached back to pull up the 3.0 version!? This seriously complicates things for an international event. Using 4.0 would have placed all entries on level ground.

The terms given by the GGJ are so far wrong they could be considered fraudulent. It's generally a good idea to understand the license before using it. Expect to see one or all of these sponsoring companies violating the license any day now (knowingly or not)...

Wow, the facepalm. It hurts.

The wikidata page is similarly stamped:
"All structured data from the main and property namespace is available under the Creative Commons CC0 License; text in the other namespaces is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.", which links to http://creativecommons.org/pub... and the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

And CC0 is no copyleft license. "text in the other namespaces" is only a small minority of wikidata's data.

So, there you go. WP doesn't suffer. The appearance of Wikipedia data in Google's Knowledge Panels furthers WP's goals.

Now google decides what appears in the info box. Also, the image is chosen by google, and all other data than the short description also come from some google database. So while wikipedia is still prominent, its position is weakened.

When "piracy" became hijacked from meaning the naval context, copying was rampant. In the 80's as kids we couldn't afford all the games so we (illegally) shared them. Hell, I got into computers simply because it was a fun challenge to "krack" software. In the 90's In college/university we used BBS's, FSP (how many know about _that_ protocol!!), FTP with hidden directories containing control characters, IRC with XDCC, binary newsgroup with split .RARs., in 2000's we used Torrents and/or P2P such as Emule, etc. It wasn't until years later did we learn that piracy = lack of respect for the author's distribution. As adults we buy things because we want to support the author(s) to produce more. And if it is crap we vote with our wallet -- and tell others to not buy it.

What is kind of ironic and completely counter-intuitive is that those who pirate tend to spend more but that is a discussion for another day. (Part of the problem is that certain "assets" are not even available to be legally purchased, etc.)

IMHO Piracy begins AND ends with education. Futurama's Bender made fun of this "archaic philosophy" that "Sharing is illegal" by joking "You wouldn't steal X, right? Or would I !" meme along with the popular "You wouldn't download car?" Because most people are able to separate the issue from money vs freedom. i.e. Artists want to share their creations. Consumers want to share those same creations -- that is what culture does -- preserves "popular" art in whatever medium. Unfortunately the context behind those same reason's don't always sync up. You have bands like The Who who don't care about "bootlegging"; other sellout bands like Metallica that only care about the money and could care less if fans help "market" the band.

Kids these day's aren't stupid. They are questing the status quo that: "Why is illegal sharing illegal? Because of arbitrary financial reasons??" id software created the shareware model -- give part of the game away for free, customers can spend money to buy the rest. These days Humble Bundles let people pay what they want. IMHO this is the correct way to do things. Compromise between 2 conflicting ideals. Open Source or Creative Commons is another approach.

Google making it harder to find digital goods is not going to change a dam thing. Google wasn't around when we were kids and piracy was rampant. Removing a search engine will only drive the process back underground when it peaked with The Pirate Bay in the mid 2000's.

Piracy has existed since the beginning of the network. Any technological means to try to remove it is like pissing in the ocean. Yeah good luck with that !

I don't think Amazon, as evil as they are, are the real culprit in this scenario. Educational publishing has always been used as a way to fleece learners for extra cash. I doubt Purdue are any exception. In contrast, non-profit, egalitarian educational publishing is quite different, e.g. a course text book, authored by one of the leading researchers in his field, is free to download and print as the whole book or chapter by chapter: http://www.aupress.ca/index.ph... It's Creative Commons licensed so learners can do whatever they like with it within the generous terms of the licence: http://creativecommons.org/lic... They can also buy a professionally printed and bound copy of it for $39.95 CAD. All the publications from Athabasca University Press are like this. So why is Purdue charging $100s per student for text books? And why do we have to have new editions every year or so when undergraduate studies are mostly on topics and subject matter that are well-established and don't change very much?

All I can see here is Amazon trying to get a bigger foothold in the market for this cash cow.

I'll mention right up front that most of the more than 10,000 photos I've published on Flickr were, and continue to be, under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence. Most of the people who have used my photos have done so quietly, without any fuss. Now and again, someone asks politely if they can use a photo even though it is clearly marked as to which licence applies, and my Flickr Profile also makes this clear and goes so far as to say how I prefer to be attributed. If I think that anyone wanting to use my photos might have problems with the Share-Alike part (e.g. commercial enterprises who want to keep their own licences on the content) I just generally quietly change the licence to Attribution only and let them get on with it. I may be unusual in this way as my intent is to provide a service to the community - and that's what I see CC as being all about. And as a result, many hundreds of web pages feature my photos. And this probably saves them a dollar or two. It looks like a win-win situation from here.

I do, however, reserve the right to change the licence on any of my photos, no matter when they were first published. I'm trying to build up a small fine art portfolio and intend to continue changing some photos to All Rights Reserved. And I've stated as such in my Flickr Profile. But that in no way affects the rights of anyone who has used any of my photos beforehand. As far as I'm concerned, the date of publication should settle the issue of who has which rights. If someone used my photo under CC BY-SA on the 31st of March, say, and I change the licence to ARR on the 1st of April, then that person's rights don't change as regards their use of the photo up to and including 31st March. They don't have to take the photo down, and I won't charge them for its use. If they reuse the photo after that then it's likely to be because they don't know about the licence change. If I find out they've reused it, I'll let them know about the licence but won't insist that they find another photo. After all, I might not know they've reused it until months afterwards. So I'll always err on the generous side. So that I can continue providing a service. At some point in the near future, I'll convert most of my photos to CC BY to make this easier.

Having said all this, I know that some other photographers are far less easy-going, even to the point of being litigious. My opinion is that the Creative Commons (i.e. whoever 'officially' represents it) needs to look at the wording on the CC website and especially any legalese therein, and rewrite it to include information and guidelines as to what should happen when a contributor intends to change their licence. If, as I believe is the case legally, the date of publication is primary in deciding who has what rights, then the website should make this clear to both contributors and users of creative work. Users should be clear that, if the licence on a work changes, their use up to that date is lawful and cannot be challenged; and that reuse of the same work after the date of change of the licence comes under the provisions of the new licence exclusively. Likewise, contributors should also abide by this and not attempt to charge fees in retrospect for lawful use of a work prior to the date of change of the licence.

For me, the spirit of the CC movement is most important, but the letter needs to be nailed down a lot tighter than it currently is.

IANAL.
For CC, attribution is clearly specified. With their attribution blog post, Stackexchange people are just wrong. They write: "Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."
However they are wrong, as not the author, but the cc license specifies attribution, you can read the legal code, section 4. c).

So your last point is not very strong, at least not for CC licenses.

I think what @Charliemopps is looking for is CC0 :

The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. See Other Information below.

From https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

My sites free. I pay to host it. Anyones free to go there, download my content. I've no intention of ever applying ANY license to any of it. You can even use it for commercial purposes if you like. I don't care. If you want to be nice you should throw in an attribution though.

If you don't apply an explicit license, standard copyright applies, and that is "all rights reserved, no copying allowed beyond fair use." I'd recommend applying the CC-BY license or the GNU All-Permissive License to your pages.

CC0:

sing CC0, you can waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waivable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, and database rights and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data.

If you want to quote mine and manipulate my CC0 works and misrepresent me as saying something I didn't mean, then go right ahead. The Internet may bite bullshit hard at first, but it is a cybernetic system of self correction, and it is my friend. I am not afraid.

Perhaps instead of signing over the copyright directly the author can post it as (cc0) or (cc by), etc, or if not, retain a license to publish the original text on their blog. Shouldn't state funded research be public domain by federal law? Not that it all is but I paid for lots of research via taxes, including many that don't come to fruition, yet I can't access a lot of research papers without paying again? That's asinine, In fact, I don't accept that -- such backwards concepts are not allowed to exist in my reality.

This shouldn't even be a problem in the Age of Information. Research should be posted free for all to see, the work to complete it has already been paid for. Peer review and/or verification of the work should be included in the grant / subsidy contingent upon success or crowd-funded. It is a conflict of interest to fund the vetting of science in any journal that benefits by its publication. Instead, I ask: Where the hell is my Scientific Hitchhiker's Guide? -- It is ridiculous that this world doesn't have an open wiki of research simply because journals leverage the economically untenable sale of artificially scarce information.

If such a Digital Alexandrian Library did exist, then we'd be able to look up the first version posted without said corrections ala wayback machine or a research repo SCM, so waiving your "moral rights" wouldn't matter. Corrections and validation would require citations from other research, it would be easier to reference a paper, and if it were like the Hitchhiker's Guide: Earth Edition, then one could filter by verified research approved by editors, or go with the unfiltered firehose of information. You could then point people to the part where their defaming statements about you were created, by whom, and contest the information in a neutral way.

If you're worried about folks saying bad things about you then GTFO THE INTERNET FAST, MORON! (oops, too late) There is no objective test for offending remarks! I could say, "$PERSON loves kitties!" and you could sue me for defamation claiming I made offensive remarks about you participating in bestiality. It's these laws that are the problem.

There are no such things as rights. There is only freedom, or restriction. In absence of all freedom there is no restriction of action. We make laws to help prevent your actions from limiting the freedoms of others. The problem is that laws can be made that limit freedom for no good reason. We should always seek to reduce the number of laws restricting us to achieve maximum freedom and peace. Speech isn't violence, and thus should never be restricted, not even when Nature has to show how much of an idiot you were when printing a correction. You can not prove that something someone presented is offensive or derogatory because that is a matter of the observer's opinion. Things can only be true or false objectively, not subjectively. Get over it. If your lawmakers had any sense, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place, you litigious prick.

There is no explicit mention of a copyright in the document itself, but the authors have posted this on their home page:

Copyright Notice: We don't think much of copyright, so you can do what you want with the content on this blog. Of course we are hungry for publicity, so we would be pleased if you avoided plagiarism and gave us credit for what we have written. We encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded, you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Good point. The final versions seem to be at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ (use the "View Legal Code" links).

Sure. They can be found at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/4.0/Drafts.

It can be, but it's discouraged;
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

There's plenty of free software licenses, libre and otherwise, open source and otherwise, you can choose from that have little to nothing to do with GNU (not sure if you're just referring to GPL there, or..)

Github suggests using this site, but there's other comparative / flowchart-based ones if you google about:
http://choosealicense.com/

TFA and TFS are both confusing, because in one sentence they say it's CC licensed, and in another they say public domain. Those are two very different things.

It is the CC0 licence, which effectively releases the work into the Public Domain.

From the CC0 FAQ:

A person using CC0 (called the “affirmer” in the legal code) dedicates a work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her copyright and neighboring and related rights in a work, to the fullest extent permitted by law. If the waiver isn’t effective for any reason, then CC0 acts as a license from the affirmer granting the public an unconditional, irrevocable, non exclusive, royalty free license to use the work for any purpose.

Here you are, your highness.

I don't know why Debian can't package it, but I think it has to do with the fact that Debian is extraordinarily picky about licensing.

Public domain means anyone can have it for free as long as they don't try and sell it.

No. CC license != public domain. Public domain is not a license. There is nothing at all stopping you from collecting the works of HP Lovecraft, publishing them, and selling them. The published product itself is protected, but the stories are not.

A couple of items. First, you should be aware of the CC0 license, which is a way for a creator to explicitly place a work into the public domain, or to disclaim as many rights as legally possible. It asserts that the creator had all legal and moral rights to the work, and that the creator explicitly gives these rights to the public, to the greatest extent possible under law. Second, you're absolutely right about being able to sell stuff which is in the public domain (although finding a buyer can sometimes be tricky).

The colophon of the book states it clearly enough:
"This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. If you distribute this work or a derivative, include the history of the document."
"The source code is available at: https://github.com/ASCTech/mooculus/tree/master/public/textbook"

I guess the rush to post overwhelmed any curiosity in the material itself. Yes, the repetition "or send a or send a" exists in the textbook.

The Creative Commons license is perfect for this.

http://creativecommons.org/

BTW, I think Pearl Jam released one of their videos under a Creative Commons license, allowing fans to alter, re-cut, modify it to their hearts' content.

Git Hub is based in the USA where public domain dedications are well established (see the link in the post you are replying to) so it is very likely that source distributed by Git Hub can be in the public domian. If you are really paranoid you can use the CC0 to dedicate to the public domain or achieve as near as possible an effect.

It doesn't matter where you store your stuff. What matters for which copyright laws to apply is where you (the author) live/what citizenship you have.

You can't transfer ownership in germany at all. You can of course license your works under whatever terms you choose (for example CC0), but Public Domain like in the US where you basically give up any rights on your work forever is impossible here.
That doesn't change just because I publish something in the US or even because I might stay there for a while.

Git Hub is based in the USA where public domain dedications are well established (see the link in the post you are replying to) so it is very likely that source distributed by Git Hub can be in the public domian. If you are really paranoid you can use the CC0 to dedicate to the public domain or achieve as near as possible an effect.

From a brief skimming of TFA and some links, I think the license in question is CC BY-NC. From the full legal text of CC BY-NC 3.0:
"You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works."
So, barter is okay. Selling a copy, even in another medium (e.g. it's a copyright violation to produce a play based on a copyrighted book) is not. "Directed toward commercial advantage" reads, to me, like, "using as a marketing gimmick," which is how TFS characterizes the situation.

Evalimine is a publication, on github, of the software the Estonian government uses for electronic voting. Confusion has arisen on that project ( see the issues ) about the license the guys used who put that code on github: they chose Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License which basically forbids forking. Strange.