Placing documents into the public domain (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Placing documents into the public domain (2008)

cr.yp.to

19 pointsaburan2819 comments

Why not use a CC0 license which is essentially the same?

The document is from 2008 and the CC0 licence was started in 2007, finalized 2009.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_license#Zer...

Public domain licensing is popular among the kind of people who see copyright law as an annoying distraction from the fun of writing software. CC0 is an absurdly long legal document compared to, say, the MIT or BSD licenses which grant users the same rights, never mind a one-line "licence" like "dedicated to the public domain, no rights reserved".

CC0 might be very long but in my opinion it's the better choice for creative work that is not Software. MIT and BSD specifically mention "software" and/or "documentation" and might not apply to other works in some legislation.

Lines like "dedicated to the public domain, no rights reserved" would be problematic as well since it is not always possible to give up all rights or the concept of public domain might not even exist (now or in the future) in your local law system.

I take a similar approach to licensing as I do with cryptography: Don't write your own crypto/legal. Stick to what has been tested, accepted and is in wide use in your targeted domain.

Slightly OT: I think it's sad that some part of the tech community thinks about the law as artificial and unneeded and flat out refuses to deal with it. Reality is that those rules are as real and as relevant to your software as are algorithms and implementation details. Sticking your head in the sand won't make this problem go away.

PS: If one demands from lawmakers to learn about technology development than one should also be willing to learn about legal development as well.

> CC0 might be very long but in my opinion it's the better choice for creative work that is not Software. MIT and BSD specifically mention "software" and/or "documentation" and might not apply to other works in some legislation.

My main contention with CC0 for software is that it explicitly states that patents are not affected by the license. Other than that, CC0 is probably the only good way of releasing code into the public domain (or something like it). The FSF and CC people agree about that too.

Public domain is part of copyright law. In addition, it is very western-centric to assume that all jurisdictions have as liberal public domain law as Western countries. CC0 means that works will be put in the public domain (or as close as possible) in all jurisdictions. The only negative of CC0 is that it permits patenting of CC0 works, which is quite a weird thing to explicitly allow.

If they are really the same then it doesn't matter of course. One advantage might be that everyone's heard of the public domain, I have never heard of CC0. I would not know what restrictions there are to that without reading the license carefully. But reading "public domain" tells me everything I need to know. In fact the web page explaining CC0 is kind of confusing, and links to an even longer FAQ.

And with the public domain, you don't even need a license, just write "Public Domain" where you would normally write "Copyright 2016", and it's done. Why use a license at all when the public domain exists?

> Why use a license at all when the public domain exists?

> About CC0 - "No Rights Reserved":

> The Problem > Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by these owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about doing so and contributing their work to the public domain

> A Solution > CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law. CC0 is a universal instrument that is not adapted to the laws of any particular legal jurisdiction, similar to many open source software licenses. And while no tool, not even CC0, can guarantee a complete relinquishment of all copyright and database rights in every jurisdiction, we believe it provides the best and most complete alternative for contributing a work to the public domain given the many complex and diverse copyright and database systems around the world.

https://creativecommons.org/about/cc0/

Not all jurisdictions have a concept of public domain. To claim that "public domain is good enough" is to ignore the 80% of the world that doesn't have the same copyright system as you.

What countries? Has anyone in those countries ever been sued by using public domain works? And if they don't respect Public Domain, why would they respect the CC0 license? How is writing "CC0" on the bottom of the page any different than writing "Public Domain" on the bottom of the page?

> What countries? Has anyone in those countries ever been sued by using public domain works?

It's a question of "can you willfully put your work in the public domain", not " is there an expiry on copyright". It's also possible that some company's lawyers might get unhappy if their company uses such a work.

> And if they don't respect Public Domain, why would they respect the CC0 license?

Becuase they still have copyright law, they just don't have a concept of public donation.

>How is writing "CC0" on the bottom of the page any different than writing "Public Domain" on the bottom of the page?

In western countries there's essentially no difference. But because CC0 is an actual legal document that has provisions for jurisdictions that don't recognise public domain as a concept, it's a significant difference.

The CC0 license is long because it attempts to get as close to public domain in as many jurisdictions as possible.

Well in my legislation a work becomes public domain only after all of its original authors have been dead 70 years.

There is no way to wave all rights before that. CC0 clears up this and similar issues arising when you are licensing your work to a global audience

I've got a small crowdsourced localization dictionary that I want to throw up on Github.

http://thespanishsite.com/dictionary

Should I be using CC0? I thought the MIT License was always the best license to use. I might provide some small scripts, etc, along with the data.

The data is stored in a Google Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xggGPUqjjy-qTnckFZqS...

> I thought the MIT License was always the best license to use.

This community in particular seems to like the MIT License because it is quite simple and perceived as commercial friendly. The truth is, like most things, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Open source licenses all have an agenda. If your agenda is "Anyone should be able to use this software, for any purpose, and not hold me liable," then the MIT License is perhaps the simplest option.

In my (non-lawyer) opinion, where the MIT License falls short is in assuming that all contributors, companies, and users share the basic ideal that licensing software for free use and modification is in our collective best interest. Other licenses (Apache, GPL) try to attack this problem in various ways. It turns out it's a complicated and not fully understood domain - which is why those licenses are more complex.

The point is that there is no "best" license to use because licensing is not a technical problem - it's a social problem. Licenses attempt to address the slippery concept of community using a legal framework. In choosing a license, you want to be thinking about not just the community you are currently contributing to, but the community you would ideally like to be contributing to.

If it's crowdsourced, then in order to change the license you may have to go to every single contributor and ask for permission to change the license.

I don't see a clear statement of license up at the top of your spreadsheet or your webpage. If you have a small number of contributors, and you have email addresses for all of them, you may be able to actually contact all of them in order to set a license.

You may want to read up on contributory licenses like the one Wikipedia uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Com...

What's the difference between CC0 and MIT?

With MIT you have to keep the copyright notice, so it's more comparable to CC-BY

one mayor difference: MIT talks specifically about software while CC0 is geared to all kind of works

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