[cc-community] Public-domain-style licenses (was Re: Why "Wiki license" = CC-BY-SA?)

Elizabeth Stark estark at law.harvard.edu
Thu Jan 17 16:20:29 EST 2008


Sorry to confuse things even further, but some legal scholars do consider
works like those under CC-BY as a part of the "public domain."

In short, there are many different conceptions of public domain. One of
them, and it may be the most prominent, would be works free from copyright
(and patent) exclusive rights. And I agree that it's probably best to use it
that way in this case. But that's not the only definition.

And to confuse yet again, under that definition, works under the CC PD
dedication may not technically be in the public domain, as they're
copyrighted works released under a particular license. They could be said,
though, to emulate being in the public domain.

-E

On Jan 17, 2008 4:15 PM, Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name> wrote:

>  On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 08:42 -0500, Greg London wrote:
>
>  Public Domain style licenses like CC-BY
>
>  I don't know why, but it just drives me around the bend every time you
> use this term.
>
> The *public domain* is a very specific legal term. Works available under
> the Attribution license are *not* in the public domain.
>
> I know you have good motives, Greg, but it's confusing for people when you
> use the term "public domain" incorrectly. I know that you mean "very
> liberal" or "contributing to a greater commons" or "belonging to everyone",
> but I think it throws people off to use a well-established term in a
> different way.
>
> It's like if I said, "copyleft licenses, like Attribution-NonCommercial,
> ..." and then insisted that by "copyleft" I mean that the author has "left"
> the commercial use rights out of the package. It's clever (-ish), but
> ultimately the confusion caused isn't worth making my idiosyncratic point.
>
> Could you explain why you use the overloaded term "public domain" for
> these kinds of license, rather than finding a related and less confusing
> one, like "public property"? "Group ownership"? "Free Cultural Work"?
>
> -Evan
>
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