Creative Commons Releases "Zero" License

revealingheart writes "Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0. The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn't a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate."

Comments

How amusing

[wjh31]

I find it sadly amusing that copyright and similar concepts has gotten so far that there should be countries in which it is not possible to waive elements of it

Re:How amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, we traditionally haven't granted moral rights, and we barely do now (most authors don't get them, as it happens). Yet we manage to have incentivized plenty of authors anyway.

It seems to me that moral rights - ie, being recognised as the original author of a particular work - aren't about incentivizing authors. They may have that effect, but their main purpose is more like trademark law: if I see a book written by J.K. Rowling, I want to know that it's actually been written by her, and not by someone else who has been forced to give up their credit.

I'm actually rather worried that attribution is being lumped in with distribution under the banner of copyright. I'd like to see exclusive distribution rights limited to a term of 6-12 months, but I'm perfectly happy with attribution rights existing in perpetuity.

Local law can still be a problem

[Enleth]

Unfortunately, the concept of "public domain" is nonexistent in some legal systems. Polish law, for example, is extremely idiotic in this aspect - not only it's not possible in Poland to publish a work anonymously to give it a public domain status (because the law states that for anonymous works, the role of a "temporary" author is to be claimed by default by the "collective copyright management institutions", read "RIAA-alikes", at least until the author decides to announce himself - and their primary objective is of course making money in every way imaginable), it's not even possible for the author to waive his rights to monetary compensation for his works and control over their current and future use - that is, given the wording of the Polish law, it could be argued that, for example, a programmer could revoke a GPL license on an already published piece of code, retroactively. This, sadly, means, that in Poland the "Zero" license means almost nothing - and it could easily be used by a dishonest author to sue someone using his work as if the author really waived his rights to it, and in good faith because of how the license could be perceived.

Re:Local law can still be a problem

[mlinksva]

In theory, you may be right. In practice, we can test your theory. Are there no programmers in Poland releasing code under the GPL? There are. Public copyright licenses (and waivers) turn out to be useful tools for releasing work and building community even if in theory they can't work.

Obligatory cartoon (sort of)

[Yvan256]

See thepiratebay.org for sort of an on-topic cartoon, if only at the opposite of the CC0.

Re:goes further

[mlinksva]

Nothing wrong with BSD (or MIT), though if you want a permissive license it makes some sense to use a modern one that includes some protection from patents, like Apache2. Bruce Perens explained on a recent /.'d post.

I disrespectfully do not submit

[SteveFoerster]

You assume there's only one culture involved. In much of the non-Western world copyright is a culturally alien concept foisted on people as a means of economic colonialism. In many places it's worthwhile to encourage resistance to copyright instead of assuming that copyright is just there to stay and that observance of it can only grow.