The Public Domain January 8, 2008
Posted by keito in : Licenses , trackbackAn increasing number of contributions made on the Internet today are released into the public domain. Basically this means that the author disowns any copyright on the material, allowing it to be copied, modified, and redistributed for any purpose (including commercial purposes) without the author’s permission.
Once a work is released into the public domain, it is essentially out there for anybody to use for whatever purpose – there’s no need to get permission, follow attribution guidelines, or pay royalties. The flip side is that the original author no longer has any rights over the released work – even if the work is resold and ends up making a fortune, for example, the original author can receive no recourse for it.
What, then, is the appeal of the public domain that results in so many people releasing works into the public domain in recent years? Part of the reason is similar to the reason why free licenses are so popular today: licenses are becoming increasingly more visible on the Internet, and furthermore, organizations such as the Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation have devised ways in which licensing becomes no longer an issue exclusively for law professionals but for the average Internet user too.
What is the legal backing behind releasing works into the public domain? Basically, the public domain constitutes anything that isn’t copyrighted: works in this category include formerly copyrighted works that have passed their copyright expiration date (which depends entirely on the country), works that were created before copyright was created, and works that were never in copyright (certain government-created materials, and materials that the creator released into the public domain). It depends on country to country whether releasing one’s work into the public domain is actually codified or not. In many countries, including the United States, releasing works into the public domain itself is not codified, and is instead treated as an abandonment of property (since copyright is automatically assigned under the Berne Convention) under common law.
Public domain is basically the most radical copyleft license there is; the author reserves no right to it the licensed work, and licensees are free to do whatever they wish with the work, whether that involves plain copying, modification, or redistribution, for profit or otherwise. The number of Internet users subscribing to a copyleft approach as radical as this is still very low. This is completely logical, as users will feel less well compensated by a public domain work than, say, a work licensed under the only slightly less radical Creative Commons Attribution license.
Because of this, I do not feel that there is any specific need to press for authors to release their works into the public domain. It is far more important to encourage more individuals, and more organizations and companies, to use a license that offers real freedoms (as do the Creative Commons licenses), but still offer the copyright owner some protection.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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