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

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Fri Jan 18 09:49:41 EST 2008


> 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).

If "public domain style license" isn't clear enough,
then I need a term that describes the set of licenses
that are nearly public domain except for some basic
requirements to keep copyright notices, names, titles,
and urls in place and so on. These works are licensed
in such a way that they are clearly different than
a copyleft work or an all rights reserved work.

Generic terms such as "free", "libre", or "open" won't
distinguish these nearly public domain works from
copyleft works, because near public domain works can
be taken private, copyleft works can't. There needs
to be a category name for these groups of licenses
that is different than copyleft.

Right now, I'm thinking something like:

"Public Domain Plus One"

While this phrase might cause cognitive dissonance with some
when they read it for the first time, it should be obvious that

PD+1 !== PD

That PD Plus One is not the same as PD.

Then the question is what does the "plus one" mean.
At which point, that investigation is left to the reader.
It leaves some questions, but then no one can complain that
it will confuse readers into thinking that CC-BY is
exactly the same as Public Domain.

It also works nicely on a mathematical scale:

PD < PD+1 < copyleft < Copyright (all rights reserved)

Where Public Domain has zero restrictions on it,
and as you increment or head to the right
you add restrictions. And full copyright of
all rights reserved is the max value on the far right.

I'll ponder it for a while and see if I come up with
anything better. Right now, this seems to work for me.
I don't think anyone can read "public domain plus one"
and walk away thinking that it is exactly the same as
"public domain".

Greg








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