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What Is Public Domain?

Posted by timothy on from the and-such-small-portions dept.

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."

3 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. read Digital Copyright by bluGill · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Current BitTorrent license by bramcohen · · Score: 5, Informative
    BitTorrent (which I'm the author of) is currently released under the MIT license. There is a single file in it which is LGPL - if anyone who knows Python hasn't read the code yet and would like to help clean-room that one file I would much appreciate it.

    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.

  3. Re:the only real public domain: by dinotrac · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.