Slashdot Mirror
What Is Public Domain?
whitefox writes: "The Seattle Times has an interesting article in today's edition on what is public domain. After sharing the experience one software writer had with businesses and people shying away from BitTorrent because they didn't understand the concept of 'public domain,' they take the reader on a tour of how public domain is being defined by groups such as Creative Commons and to the battle of copyright-extensions in Eldred v. Ashcroft."
An idea, once expressed belongs to the world, aka, the public domain. Copyright was invented as a way to temporarily allow creative people to profit from expressing their ideas in writing, song, etc. Unfortunately, copyright has become a nearly permanent thing to enrich greedy corporate robber barons at the expense of the public domain, which soon may be a footnote in history Hollywood, the RIAA et al are trying to convince legislators that copyright is a natural right. I sure hope we can stop them, but since we can't grease palms the way the corporations do, it won't be easy.v eror.com/radio.htm
http://www.dontbuycds.org
http://www.unco
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Jessica Litman wrote an excellent book Digital Copyright, which I recomend everyone read.
In the book she references a discussion of copyright lawyers, many of whom hold the opinion that it is not legally possibla to place works in the public domain.
Thankfully, I haven't gotten a single piece of mail pestering me about the license since I switched away from public domain, even though MIT is almost as permissive.
I did do one slightly controversial thing - I capitalized the legal discraimer properly. Usually it's all caps, which I think is ugly and pointless. I did leave the part where it says "AS IS" in caps though.
BitTorrent development, by the way, is proceeding apace. The first mature release, with a finalized protocol and no phoning home on startup to make sure it's still a current version, will probably be released within the next few weeks.
Here are some other charts, which might be easier to interpret since their axes are labeled and the models are explained:
"constant authorship per year" model
"constant authorship per capita per year" model
No. The GPL is expressly and explicitly not public domain.
The GPL grants a limited set of rights in exchange for a defined set of obligations. The copyright holder retains ownership.
Public domain grants nothing. The creator of a public domain work renounces all ownership or, by expiration of rights, loses ownership. Without ownership, you can not impose conditions.
That is what makes the public domain the only truly "free" province of Intellectual Property.
The GPL diverges from the public domain in order to insure certain behaviors that its drafters consider vital to the vitality of free software. They have placed limitations on some freedoms in order to protect others.
But this is not the case. Consider the following...
I have created a work, and I am the copyright holder. I have published this work as a CSS protected DVD. Now I wish to completely relinquish my copyrights to this work and make the work freely available for one and all to use.
As the copyright holder, I have the exclusive right to decide who can copy [1] my work. I can grant you explicit permission to make a copy [1] of that DVD, or by placing my work into the public domain, I can allow everyone to copy [1] my work. What I cannot do is grant you or anyone the permission to access my work who is not already licensed to do so by the DVD Copy Control Association. And if DVDCCA is unwilling [2] or unable [3] to grant such a license, the right to speak [1] my work becomes abridged [4] through a law [5] enacted by Congress.
So the technical answer is "No, I cannot "allow others to use it completely and freely without worry about any sort of licensing issues."
This is a terrible tangled web we are weaving ourselves into. How many of your copyrighted works would be locked forever on your hard drive if Microsoft revoked your license to access those files?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
For example, MTV used the footage of the moon landing in their early advertising because it was available to them freely.
The footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, like all works of the United States government, entered the public domain upon creation (17 USC 105). "A 'work of the United States Government' is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties" (101).
Will I retire or break 10K?
BitTorrent was written using experience gained writing the transport layer of Mojo Nation, however, there are hardly any shared concepts and very little (hopefully soon to be no) shared code.