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

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Thu Jan 17 23:11:28 EST 2008


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

This is of course an enormous oversimplification, as your own books
point out.

Beyond that, though, I thoroughly agree with Evan that CC-By, MIT/X11,
BSD etc are *NOT* "public domain" licenses. Not even in the abstract. So
I also find your usage causes some cognitive dissonance when reading
your works (I have to mentally substitute "free/non-copyleft" for it).

All of these licenses make specific requirements in exchange for the use
of the work which depend on the copyright to make them valid.
Specifically, they all *legally enforce* attribution.

It might be reasonable to call the new "CC0" license a "public domain
license" (although some people would call that phrase an oxymoron
because anything in the public domain neither has nor needs a license).
I think that "CC0" means a license without even the attribution
requirement, so it approximates public domain.

With public domain works, you do not have to keep ANY kind of license or
attribution information. This is a "door" that you don't discuss in
"Libre Labyrinth", and it is a much less controversial one, because most
people aren't bothered by tracking attribution, but it is there,
nevertheless. There are even some circumstances under which this can be
a quite onerous requirement (like the BSD advertising clause was).

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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