[cc-licenses] Public Domain Mark - Invitation to Comment
Diane Peters
diane at creativecommons.org
Thu Aug 12 21:16:20 EDT 2010
Hi James,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. While we're setting aside the
guidelines/norms for the time being, just a couple of thoughts in line
below.
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 11:35 AM, James Grimmelmann
<james at grimmelmann.net>wrote:
> I share the concerns that Douglas Campbell has expressed about the
> difficulty of a non-binding norm project. Indeed, I'm concerned about the
> idea of a "group" or a "community" being a relevant actor for purposes of
> setting norms about the use of public-domain material. Any such norms
> should flow with the group or community, not with the work itself -- because
> that would imply that the group/community could and should project its norms
> beyond itself, to anyone who comes across the work. Part of the point of
> being in the public domain is precisely that one may take a work from one
> normative community to another, changing its context, its relevance, and its
> meaning. That is, there are times when it's actually very important to
> insist on one's individual, stand-alone, atomistic, answerable-to-no-one
> legal rights, and the public domain can be a powerful source of such rights.
>
Anyone can re-publish a work that’s free of copyright restrictions (assuming
no other restrictions exist on doing so) and apply their own
community-relevant norms. So it’s not immediately clear how the concern
expressed – that somehow a group or community could, to the exclusion of
others, establish the norms governing a public domain work – would play out
in practice. But I agree it merits discussion at the right point.
>
> I understand the attempt to get around those concerns by emphasizing that
> the norms are non-binding. But this approach also swims in ambiguity; are
> the norms meant to have an effect on potential users or not? That's going
> to vary from situation to situation, and confusion is likely to result among
> many possible users. I think it would be better to release these norms as
> possible best practices for groups and communities and groups to adopt for
> themselves, and not to pitch them as applying to anything so broad as all
> "providers and users of material in the public domain."
> I would also add:
>
> It would be better not to say that the copyright holder "failed to register
> or renew copyright." Instead, "did not register or renew copyright" would
> be less normative; "failed" suggests that they should have. This is the
> same kind of rhetorical slant that comes from the phrase "fall into the
> public domain."
>
That’s a good suggestion – we’ll look for other instances where we may have
made similar, inadvertent misstatements and adjust when we revisit the
guidelines/norms.
>
> What gives the "provider" of public-domain material. in general, the moral
> right to ask for "respect" in the form of, say, no modifications? There
> will be some situations -- families disclosing an author's papers, for
> example -- in which respect seems like an appropriate principle. But there
> will be many others -- say, libraries digitizing 19th-century public-domain
> books -- in which it doesn't make as much sense. I doubt that this can be a
> universal norm. ("Respect" in the form of clearly identifying any
> modifications seems more likely to universalize.)
>
> "Contribute discoveries back" is too broad. If I make a movie based on the
> plot and characters of an out-of-copyright play, which transposes the
> setting to outer space, puts all of the dialogue in modern technical jargon,
> and is filled with special effects, people can fairly disagree as to whether
> I should also place the movie into the public domain. There is legitimate
> principle here, but it is much narrower than the proposed norm.
>
> -----
>
> As for the mark itself, Luis Villa's point is well-taken. In general, the
> PDM **needs** to reflect the fact that it is an assertion about the work,
> made by a third party. The "No Copyright" clause at the top should, I
> think, explicitly say, "The person who identified this public domain work
> believes that it is free of restrictions under copyright law ..." It would
> be fine to tweak the language so that it doesn't create any legally
> enforceable warranties. But the key point is that the PDM takes the form "A
> says that work X is in the public domain." (Does the metadata allow for
> multiple identifying parties?) CC0, as Luis points out, instead takes the
> form, "C, the copyright owner, has placed work X in the public domain."
>
Yep, we've been looking at the language for both PDM and CC0 as I indicated
in response to Luis, and we may be making some tweaks to make them more
parallel but still distinctive so that it's clear which is which.
>
> James
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--
Diane M. Peters, General Counsel
Creative Commons
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San Francisco, CA 94105
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fax: +1 415-278-9419
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skype: peterspdx
email:diane at creativecommons.org <email%3Adiane at creativecommons.org>
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