What Is Public Domain?

whitefox writes: "The Seattle Times has an interesting article in today's edition on what is public domain. After sharing the experience one software writer had with businesses and people shying away from BitTorrent because they didn't understand the concept of 'public domain,' they take the reader on a tour of how public domain is being defined by groups such as Creative Commons and to the battle of copyright-extensions in Eldred v. Ashcroft."

How is this difficult?

[Hygelac]

I must be asleep today, but what is so difficult about defining Public Domain? It has to be the simplest form of copy(right|left|middle) there is. The article seemed to bounce all over the place trying to make the issue confusing, but I'm confused about the confusion. ???

You can't abandon cars or real property

[coyote-san]

Why does he think you can put code into the public domain?

You can't abandon a car, you'll eventually be tracked down and made to pay for proper disposal. Same thing with real property - you will be tracked down and hit with cleanup fees for any toxic wastes you left behind.

Is software really any different? Think about it - most software is of no lasting consequence, but some of it can cause a lot of damage (Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft IIS, others) before the producer may be tempted to just abandon it and (hopefully) all associated liabilities.

I know we usually compare source code to books, but as some Federal judges like to point out (while denying it the full protection of the First Amendment) it also has an active component. A cookbook can be put into the public domain, but a cookbook doesn't create a fire or health hazard as it attempts to prepare the meals it describes.

Maybe the people uncomfortable with truly public domain software are aware of something that we're missing....

public domain vs copyright

[reverse flow reactor]

The problem with copyright is that is tries to accomplish two things: control distribution and maintain authenticity. These two goals need to be split up so that creative persons may choose to limit one or the other, or both, or neither.

For example, this post. I can care less how much this post is distributed. However, I do care that when it is distributed, it is distributed in verbatum, and that I am not bein misrepresented. I want to be able to control the authenticity of a work (to protect myself from libel and misrepresentation and plagarism, and to allow myself to receive credit for first stating an idea), but I do not want to inhibit the discussion or distribution of this post.

Another example - the ideal academic journal would allow me to maintain authenticity of my writings (so I can be credited with a discovery or recognised as an authority on a topic based on my work), but place no restrictions on the distribution of my academic publications. That way, more people can hear about my ideas and comment on them and build on them and apply those ideas.

Another example - a composer could write a song. Authenticity rights are granted. Distribution rights (or time-limited exclusive commercial distribution) are negotiated with a corporation willing to print CD's and ship them to stores around the world.

Maybe these are just rambling - post your comments below

Public Domain is too free for most creative works

[jcsehak]

While it may be fine for a piece of code, putting a creative work like a song in the public domain can be dangerous. When I first started releasing my music, I wanted to make it free for people to listen to, copy and change. But I realised: what if the KKK made a propaganda video and wanted to use a song of mine in the soundtrack? If my work was PD, or even released under the EFF's Open Audio License [eff.org], they'd be able to. Open source purists might argue that people should be allowed to use free work for good and for evil, and that may be alright when your work is an app that converts mp3s to oggs, but with music it's not that simple. If a song of mine was used in a KKK video, not only would it compromise the artisitic integrity of the song, but it would ruin the experience for anyone who heard it first alongside the video. More importantly, my reputation would be shot to hell, because it would be an easy matter for people to assume that I worked alongside the KKK for this project.

Another issue I have is that if I put my songs into the public domain, and Sting, for instance, hears them and likes them (work with me here, it *could* happen), there's nothing to stop him from rerecording them as his own work. Then when I play my own song later on down the road, people would say "Hey, that's a Sting song!" Not only that, but Sting would be free to copyright them, so I would have to get his permission before releasing an album of my own songs! For these reasons, when I wrote the Open Sourse Music License [rootrecords.org], I kept it as close to the GPL as possible, but included a term to prevent people from displaying a song alonside accompanying video without the author's permission. I was hesitant to include it, but I don't think I had any other choice. If anyone else has any better ideas, let me know.

I fully applaud the Creative Commons, and everything they're doing with it, but for many people releasing your works into the PD can cause a lot more problems than it will solve.

Mickey Mouse has fallen into PD despite Bono Act

[yerricde]

If not, maybe some of the movie copyrights can be invalidated -- don't you love irony?

Lauren Vanpelt has done the math and found that Mickey Mouse has already fallen into the public domain [asu.edu] due to a faulty copyright notice. (Back then, "© 1929" wasn't enough; it had to be "© 1929 Walt Disney".)

Therefore, because there is a public domain DVD encrypted with CSS, and because the DMCA's circumvention ban (17 USC 1201 [cornell.edu]) affects only "works protected under this title" (i.e. copyrighted works), DeCSS is now legal if marketed only to decrypt public domain content on DVDs (1201(a)(2); 1201(b)(1)). Good news for Charlie Chaplin DVD [amazon.com] collectors.

Sonny Bono hit that tree, the concept of a vibrant public domain died. [pineight.com]

Matrix original?

[yerricde]

It's rare you see a completely original idea (... The Matrix)

The Matrix was not entirely original. What it didn't borrow from Ghost in the Shell it borrowed from the Christian Bible [config.com] and East Asian wire-fu movies [logophilia.com] (CTHD's predecessors).

"Public Domain" too dangerous

[tlambert]

I would put most of my source code in the Public Domain, if I could.

I can't.

Not "I won't".

I *can't*.

My problem is that, without a license, I can't attach a "hold harmless", or prevent my name being used to sell code derived from it, but of which I personally would not approve.

So to keep rights to my good name, and protect myself (as much as possible) from litigation arising from the use of my gifts to the public, I have to attach the minimum possible license that still gets me these things (the BSD license).

It's not that I *want* to do this, it's that there are no implicit legal protections for the authors of works placed into the public domain.

Without such legal protections, I simply can't *afford* to make the gifts that I want to make to the public.

It's just too dangerous.

-- Terry

Bit Torrent

[NitsujTPU]

No offense, but I can see why people would shy away from supporting a product that causes the end user to support the distribution medium of the company in terms of server bandwidth. Not only is is quite possibly a good way to spread viruses, but also it puts undue burden on the customer.

If I had to chose between Visio and Rational Rose (ick on both), but Rational required me to mirror their software on my machine as a distribution medium, I would go with Visio.

Re:Bit Torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

If it means you get what you want downloaded faster (both in speed and in queue length), then many people would make this sacrifice. More sources = faster downloads. This provides more sources for popular downloads.

Is it really 'public domain' that is the problem?

[vrassoc]

I'm just speculating here, but maybe the resistance to Cohen's concept is more the nature of the concept itself, rather than the fact that he's trying to give away the client software.

I, for one, will always be suspicious of a piece of software that potentially opens my computer and network to unauthorised entry.

Cohen claims that he is trying to establish a peer-to-peer file exchange protocol. Well, he should publish the protocol then. If it is worth using there will be a multitude of free, well tested and proven clients from reliable sources written for it in no time. How do I know what his software does? It could be dumping all my spreadsheets (databases? source code?) somewhere, for all I know.

I know that this could be true for any Internet client software, but at least they work on well defined protocols and are usually tried and tested and offered by reliable sources by the time they reach me.

Publish the protocol. Write an RFC. Let the community test its usefulness and the software will take care of itself.

Personally I think people just don't want to share their work in that way. Remember that Napster et al gained its popularity because they could be used to easily share bootleg binaries, seemingly, without fear of prosecution for the owners of the servers, because they didn't host the pirated stuff. In the case where people want to share genuinely free files, there is nothing stopping Cohen from simply starting a repository for such material that people can access via FTP.

Re:Part of copyright should be the right to not

[Royster]

You can relinquish copyright by executing a legal document. Ironically, in the era of automatic protection of works, you have to explicitly do something if you *don't* want protection.

If you have used a means of publishing as tied up in licensing issues as CSS protected DVDs, (DVDs without CSS can indeed be made and used) then you really can't complain that people can't use it.

You could just as easily have published your work on hollerinth cards and no one would be able to read it either.

Copylefted public domain...

[anthony_dipierro]

I like public domain, but I don't want someone to take my software (or writing), make a few changes, and then claim copyright on what is essentially mine. So I came up with the QingPL [inbox.org]. It gives all the benefits of public domain, except that you can't create derivitive works without giving others the same rights.