headers
tav | 26 Jan 2011 04:56
Gravatar

Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

Hi Arto, Mike et al.

First of all, congrats for coming up with the term "Unlicense". It's
genius! As someone who has been placing all of his work into the
public domain for most of the last decade, I am very thankful that
there is finally a concrete movement emerging around unlicensing.

Now, if it's okay with you, I'd like to share my journey into the
world of public domain and gradually build up to a proposal of a
"Creative Commons Unlicense".

# Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

They got me before I'd even hit puberty. The UK Intellectual Property
Office that is. At school they handed out leaflets on Copyright,
Trademarks and Patents. I was mesmerised. Having already written 2
books on music and working on various inventions, it was truly
empowering to know that the law would protect my rights as a creator.

Being able to dictate how your work is used. Being able to make money
from the royalties generated by your work. Being able to prevent
others from abusing your work for their own profit. It made perfect
sense. It appealed to that primal desire for being in control.

I was so in love with intellectual property that even my school notes
had a copyright statement at the bottom of each page. This continued
all the way till I was 17 when I started my first company. Being a
tech startup in 1999, it wasn't too long before an inevitable
encounter with the open source movement.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply |
headers
Peter Saint-Andre | 26 Jan 2011 05:30
Favicon

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

On 1/25/11 8:56 PM, tav wrote:

> Please do let me know what you think.

Awesome stuff, tav. Let's get to work!

BTW, will anyone on this list be at FOSDEM 2011 in early February? It'd
be great to talk in person.

Peter

--

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/
Attachment (smime.p7s): application/pkcs7-signature, 6105 bytes
Permalink | Reply |
headers
Peter Saint-Andre | 26 Jan 2011 06:02
Favicon

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

On 1/25/11 8:56 PM, tav wrote:

> Now, whilst I've adopted the term wholesale, the text on unlicense.org
> doesn't address a number of concerns:
> 
> * It is limited to just code. Software projects also tend to have
> documentation, schemas, graphics, etc. It would be nice if the
> unlicense covered all of these.

Agreed -- one [un]license to bind them all!

> * It doesn't address moral rights in any way.

Yes, that is a major obstacle in some jurisdictions.

> * It doesn't address patent rights in any way. This becomes even more
> relevant when you're receiving patches from organisations who might
> hold relevant patents.

I need to think about this one a bit -- I don't like to conflate patents
and copyrights because they really are separate (I agree with Richard
Stallman that the term "intellectual property" is a package deal).

In what sense do you mean to address patent rights?

> * It doesn't provide advice on how to refer to the unlicense within
> individual files. 

Is it the job of the license itself to instruct folks on how to use it?
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply |
headers
Ben Lavender | 26 Jan 2011 09:51
Picon
Gravatar

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

Tav, I'd like to take a quick stab at addressing some of your concerns
as Arto and I saw them when we were working on it (and let me just say
that while 'we' is appropriate for 'working on it', every word was
written by Arto):

> Now, whilst I've adopted the term wholesale, the text on unlicense.org
> doesn't address a number of concerns:
>
> * It is limited to just code. Software projects also tend to have
> documentation, schemas, graphics, etc. It would be nice if the
> unlicense covered all of these.

On purpose. The various issues involved for non-code IP and code IP
are separate. They warrant separate paperwork. CC has published
statements amounting to the same.

> * It doesn't address moral rights in any way.

Correct. Specifically addressing moral rights incorrectly is a
problem, and having recently tried to do this for a real-life thing,
it's a huge, huge issue, different in many countries, and all but
impossible to get right. It can take pages and pages in Germany.

But one has to remember that contracts are not parsed by computers,
but humans. If a particular contract is invalid in a jurisdiction, a
*judge* will generally attempt to determine intent. The unlicense is
designed to stand quite well as a statement of intent in jurisdictions
that do not respect public domain assignments.

Curiously, it can be better to be *less specific* and allow a human
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply |
headers
Mike Linksvayer | 15 Apr 2011 15:32
Gravatar

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 19:56, tav <tav <at> espians.com> wrote:
> Now, if it's okay with you, I'd like to share my journey into the
> world of public domain and gradually build up to a proposal of a
> "Creative Commons Unlicense".

Hi Tav and all,

Extremely cool to run into you again, here.

I will attempt to add to this thread at length soon. I like the ideas
Tav brought up. Will take a really long time to make happen as a CC
tool (CC0 2.0 or whatever), simply because CC moves very slowly and
carefully on new instruments, which is mostly a good thing.

I'm prompted to respond at all now because there has been discussion
of public domain software instruments with FSF and others, leading to
them adding CC0 to their licenses list, and CC adding deployment
instructions for CC0 and software (lack of which I think I mentioned
previously as a barrier to use).

See https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27081

Mike
Permalink | Reply |
headers
Peter Saint-Andre | 15 Apr 2011 16:46
Favicon

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

On 4/15/11 7:32 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 19:56, tav <tav <at> espians.com> wrote:
>> Now, if it's okay with you, I'd like to share my journey into the
>> world of public domain and gradually build up to a proposal of a
>> "Creative Commons Unlicense".
> 
> Hi Tav and all,
> 
> Extremely cool to run into you again, here.
> 
> I will attempt to add to this thread at length soon. I like the ideas
> Tav brought up. Will take a really long time to make happen as a CC
> tool (CC0 2.0 or whatever), simply because CC moves very slowly and
> carefully on new instruments, which is mostly a good thing.
> 
> I'm prompted to respond at all now because there has been discussion
> of public domain software instruments with FSF and others, leading to
> them adding CC0 to their licenses list, and CC adding deployment
> instructions for CC0 and software (lack of which I think I mentioned
> previously as a barrier to use).
> 
> See https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27081

Mike, thanks for sharing the good news and for all the work you folks
did to make this possible.

For further discussion, I notice that the FSF's free license list
<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html> also says:

###
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply |
headers
Charles | 29 Apr 2011 16:11

Re: Creative Commons Unlicense and Reflections of a Public Domain Advocate

Want to say I am interested in helping this discussion get to where
its destination. On that note, a "unified" PD license should include
something like "how to Obtaining An Explicit License To Use this work"
as in sqlite which is public domain software, but also sells licenses
for those who want them <http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html>

I'm new around here, and if you're interested some relevant work of
mine on this subject from my lab <http://mr.danoff.org> is a report
"Exploring how to release something into the public domain" <http://
www.danoff.org/leftinfront/?p=1639> and a short video "The Public
Domain Paradox" <http://www.archive.org/details/
ThePublicDomainParadox>.

- Charles

--
Charles Jeffrey Danoff
Lab: http://mr.danoff.org
Home: http://danoff.org

On Apr 15, 9:46 am, Peter Saint-Andre <stpe... <at> stpeter.im> wrote:
> On 4/15/11 7:32 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 19:56, tav <t... <at> espians.com> wrote:
> >> Now, if it's okay with you, I'd like to share my journey into the
> >> world of public domain and gradually build up to a proposal of a
> >> "Creative Commons Unlicense".
>
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply |

Gmane