Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-licenses - [cc-licenses] Public Domain Mark - Invitation to Comment

cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Diane Peters <diane AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org, cc-community AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-licenses] Public Domain Mark - Invitation to Comment
  • Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 15:48:18 -0700

See our announcement on the new Public Domain Mark, text below.  Please contribute comments before Wednesday, August 18th.

We're very excited about this one!

Diane

<<>>

6th August 2010

Marking and Tagging the Public Domain:
An Invitation to Comment

Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governmentsscientistsdata providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.

We are publishing today for comment our new Public Domain Mark, a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s PD status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC0 or our licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain copyright status, not change a work’s current status under copyright. However, just like CC0 and our licenses, PDM has a metadata-supported deed and is machine readable, allowing works tagged with PDM to be findable on the Internet. (Please note that the example used on the sample deed is purely hypothetical at the moment.)

We are also releasing for public comment general purpose norms — voluntary guidelines or “pleases” that providers and curators of PD materials may request be followed when a PD work they have marked is thereafter used by others. Our PDM deed as well as an upcoming enhanced CC0 deed will support norms in addition to citation metadata, which will allow a user to easily cite the author or provider of the work through copy-paste HTML.

The public comment period will close on Wednesday, August 18th. Why so short? For starters, PDM is not a legal tool in the same sense our licenses and CC0 are legally operative — no legal rights are being surrendered or affected, and there is no accompanying legal code to finesse. Just as importantly, however, we believe that having the mark used soon rather than later will allow early adopters to provide us with invaluable feedback on actual implementations, which will allow us to improve the marking tool in the future.

The primary venue for submitting comments and discussing the tool is the cc-licenses mailing list. We look forward to hearing from you!

Diane

-- 
Diane M. Peters, General Counsel
Creative Commons
171 Second St, Suite 300
San Francisco, CA  94105
office: +1 415-369-8480
fax: +1 415-278-9419
cell: +1 503-803-8338
skype:  peterspdx
email:diane AT creativecommons.org
______________________________________

Please note: the contents of this email are not intended to be legal advice nor should they be relied upon as, or represented to be legal advice.  Creative Commons cannot and does not give legal advice. You need to assess the suitability of Creative Commons tools for your particular situation, which may include obtaining appropriate legal advice from a licensed attorney.





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page