Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>]

On 26 Mar 2005, at 02:34, drew Roberts wrote:

> On Friday 25 March 2005 08:00 pm, Gottfried Hofmann wrote:
> > Do you need to claim copyright in order to relicense something in the
> > Public Domain?
>
> Don't you mean to ask something like:
>
> Do you need to claim authorship in order to relicense and claim 
> copyright to
> something in the public domain?

You get copyright in anything you write automatically, so you don't 
have to claim it in order to have it.

Since you get it automatically you do have to make an effort to 
dedicate it to the public domain. I'm sure I've heard that there are 
some jurisdictions where copyright is inalienable so you can't do this. 
I don't remember where though. I think it might have been somewhere in 
Scandinavia.

Going the opposite way, you cannot just claim copyright on something 
that is public domain, unless that silly re-broadcasting law has been 
passed in the US.

You can claim copyright on something that features public domain work, 
either deriving from it or including it. PD is not viral. But I don't 
know what the threshold is for this.

> > Of course you cannot claim that you wrote Shakespear, but can't you
> > print and sell a Book of Shakespear and mark it "All Rights Reserved"?
>
> People seem to do things like this all the time. Still:

You cannot legally do this. In the US it's actually an offence to do 
so, I'm told.

> > > I think they were talking about the need to
> > > have some (significant?) amount of input or change before you could
> > > claim a copyright in a PD work.
>
> So, perhaps they are claiming copyright in the layout, typography, 
> selection
> of works and order of works chosen. Illustrations? I don't know. But I 
> do
> remember reading something like I said recently. I don't know if it is
> correct, and if it is if it applies everywhere.

You would need to claim copyright on either the typographic arrangement 
or, if you add or combine stuff, the aggregate work. Dover and clip art 
publishers do the aggregate thing, I'm guessing Shakespeare 
republishers do the typography thing.

- Rob.