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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."
They do.
However, public domain is a larger issue than that, and a very important one. Copyright law was originally drafted for the express purpose of enhancing the public domain, not destroying it, as recent laws have done.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
When works pass into the public domain
Growth rate of the public domain
Not whoring, at 50, yadda yadda, just thought this may be useful
I think I heard about this "Public Domain". It only applies to things that were created before the 20th Century, right? :)
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.
The problem with copyright is that is tries to accomplish two things: control distribution and maintain authenticity. These two goals need to be split up so that creative persons may choose to limit one or the other, or both, or neither.
For example, this post. I can care less how much this post is distributed. However, I do care that when it is distributed, it is distributed in verbatum, and that I am not bein misrepresented. I want to be able to control the authenticity of a work (to protect myself from libel and misrepresentation and plagarism, and to allow myself to receive credit for first stating an idea), but I do not want to inhibit the discussion or distribution of this post.
Another example - the ideal academic journal would allow me to maintain authenticity of my writings (so I can be credited with a discovery or recognised as an authority on a topic based on my work), but place no restrictions on the distribution of my academic publications. That way, more people can hear about my ideas and comment on them and build on them and apply those ideas.
Another example - a composer could write a song. Authenticity rights are granted. Distribution rights (or time-limited exclusive commercial distribution) are negotiated with a corporation willing to print CD's and ship them to stores around the world.
Maybe these are just rambling - post your comments below
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
While it may be fine for a piece of code, putting a creative work like a song in the public domain can be dangerous. When I first started releasing my music, I wanted to make it free for people to listen to, copy and change. But I realised: what if the KKK made a propaganda video and wanted to use a song of mine in the soundtrack? If my work was PD, or even released under the EFF's Open Audio License, they'd be able to. Open source purists might argue that people should be allowed to use free work for good and for evil, and that may be alright when your work is an app that converts mp3s to oggs, but with music it's not that simple. If a song of mine was used in a KKK video, not only would it compromise the artisitic integrity of the song, but it would ruin the experience for anyone who heard it first alongside the video. More importantly, my reputation would be shot to hell, because it would be an easy matter for people to assume that I worked alongside the KKK for this project.
Another issue I have is that if I put my songs into the public domain, and Sting, for instance, hears them and likes them (work with me here, it *could* happen), there's nothing to stop him from rerecording them as his own work. Then when I play my own song later on down the road, people would say "Hey, that's a Sting song!" Not only that, but Sting would be free to copyright them, so I would have to get his permission before releasing an album of my own songs! For these reasons, when I wrote the Open Sourse Music License, I kept it as close to the GPL as possible, but included a term to prevent people from displaying a song alonside accompanying video without the author's permission. I was hesitant to include it, but I don't think I had any other choice. If anyone else has any better ideas, let me know.
I fully applaud the Creative Commons, and everything they're doing with it, but for many people releasing your works into the PD can cause a lot more problems than it will solve.
c-hack.com |
If not, maybe some of the movie copyrights can be invalidated -- don't you love irony?
Lauren Vanpelt has done the math and found that Mickey Mouse has already fallen into the public domain due to a faulty copyright notice. (Back then, "© 1929" wasn't enough; it had to be "© 1929 Walt Disney".)
Therefore, because there is a public domain DVD encrypted with CSS, and because the DMCA's circumvention ban (17 USC 1201) affects only "works protected under this title" (i.e. copyrighted works), DeCSS is now legal if marketed only to decrypt public domain content on DVDs (1201(a)(2); 1201(b)(1)). Good news for Charlie Chaplin DVD collectors.
Sonny Bono hit that tree, the concept of a vibrant public domain died.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
I would put most of my source code in the Public Domain, if I could.
I can't.
Not "I won't".
I *can't*.
My problem is that, without a license, I can't attach a "hold harmless", or prevent my name being used to sell code derived from it, but of which I personally would not approve.
So to keep rights to my good name, and protect myself (as much as possible) from litigation arising from the use of my gifts to the public, I have to attach the minimum possible license that still gets me these things (the BSD license).
It's not that I *want* to do this, it's that there are no implicit legal protections for the authors of works placed into the public domain.
Without such legal protections, I simply can't *afford* to make the gifts that I want to make to the public.
It's just too dangerous.
-- Terry
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.