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

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Thu Jan 17 20:04:52 EST 2008


> On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 08:42 -0500, Greg London wrote:
>
>> Public Domain style licenses like CC-BY
>
> Could you explain why you use the overloaded term "public domain" for
> these kinds of license,

see "Libre Labyrinth"
http://www.greglondon.com/libre/TheLibreLabyrinth.pdf

There are three basic licenses:
All Rights Reserved (page 50).
Public Domain (page 48).
Copyleft (page 40).

With ARR, the doors all face the author,
the author has sole control of who enters
the other rooms.

With Public Domain, the doors all face away
from the author. Anyone can create a derivative
and take it proprietary and keep the original
author from accessing it.

With copyleft, the doors are taken off the hinges.
A work can be taken into various different rooms,
but no room can be shut off from the community.


A license such as CC-BY or MIT or BSD have exactly
the same floorplan or labyrinth as a Public Domain
work whose copyright has expired. The only difference
is the sort of bureaucratic paperwork needed to
move the work from one room to the next.

> it's confusing for people when
> you use the term "public domain" incorrectly.

In all the years I've talked with people about
FLOS stuff, I've seen people get tangled up in
what exactly "free" means. I've seen people get
completely confused about how a copyleft license
works. I've seen people get all confused over
what is and is not "commercial use".

But I have never, ever, run into someone
who couldn't tell the difference between
a work whose copyright has expired, and
a work under a "public domain style license".

I generally make a point to use the term LICENSE
with "public domain style" as adjectives/modifiers,
so it should be fairly clear that it is a license
for a work still under copyright but whose terms
are fairly close to public domain.

I haven't found it to be a big point of confusion
for people.

> 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.

the term "copyleft" is a play on the term "copyright".
Was someone being clever but ultimately causing confusion?
Creative Commons created the term "share alike" as its
version of what copyleft is. Should all references to
"copyleft" be changed to "share alike" to be clear?

Personally, I think people can figure it out.

Like I said, I haven't run into anyone who was
ever confused by the term "public domain style license".

Greg




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