Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Branko Collin" <collin AT xs4all.nl>]

On 31 Jan 2005, at 22:51, J.B. Nicholson-Owens wrote:
> MM Robinson wrote:

> > I'm an artist working on a project concerned with copyrights and I
> > have a question that was not covered in the FAQ. If I use a public
> > domain dedication, does that make the material "uncopyrightable"? In
> > other words, can someone else legally copyright material that I, as
> > the creator, dedicate to the public domain?
> 
> As I understand it, the answer is no: what others can do is build on
> the work and retain (talking from the perspective of citizens of
> countries that ratify the Bern treaty) the copyright for their
> additional elements.  Depending on the kind of work this is, of
> course, the PD portion in the derivative can be extracted and used
> freely.
> 
> So, if I make a copy of the Mona Lisa and add in an image of a new
> deluxe automobile in the background, someone else can deal with the
> rest of the untouched image as they would any other work in the public
> domain.

Famous examples (at least over here in the Netherlands) are companies 
making their own versions of some Disney cartoons, namely of the 
Disney cartoons that are derived from public domain stories 
(Snowwhite, The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, et cetera). As long as 
they base their versions on the public domain part of the stories, 
they are in the clear.

A technical problem with "extracting the public domain part" would 
seem to be that you need to know the public domain part fairly well 
to make a correct judgement on what the public domain part is. Of 
course, if you know the public domain part well enough (say, you have 
a reproduction of the Mona Lisa before you), there's no need to work 
from the derivative in the first place.

Also, it doesn't protect you (the later user, not the creator) from 
claims by publishers who believe they somehow own the public domain 
work to begin with. There are several recent examples that have come 
to light: a fake attorney claiming to own Max Havelaar in the 
Netherlands, which has been PD for quite some time, the estate of 
Margaret Mitchell claiming to have a copyright on Gone with the Wind 
in Australia, EMI Music's claim to the recording rights of the 
Beatles' White Album and Ludlow Music's claim to Woody Guthrie's song 
This Land Is My Land. And these are just cases that have come to the 
surface.

Finally, a public domain dedication in the US may not be worth much 
in the rest of the world. Parts of Europe (like Canada) collect 
levies in exchange for the right to make private copies (downloading 
MP3s is legal where I live). The collection agencies in charge of 
this have shown mostly unwilling to respect public domain 
dedications; they feel it is too much work. For those cases, a 
copyleft may actually be more beneficial.

-- 
branko collin
collin AT xs4all.nl