A copyleft public domain?
Free culture is a tightly defined ‘term of art’.
This mirrors the way “free software” is tightly defined. Spending a lot of time in a community that understands the term, its all too easy when not in such communities to blather on about “free software” and then have someone say, “But err, how does anyone make money if its free?” - completely missing the discussion is about freedom, not price.
It is legally possible to copyright a work derived from a work in the public domain. But unless you have the sole copy of something, this isn’t a problem because everyone else can also go to the original public domain source.
It is not ethically legitimate to turn what is already free culture into proprietary culture, though. To protect against this, we use “copyleft”: we copyright a work and add a restriction that maintains the freedom of the work for all later recipients.
If you transcribe a book from 1668 and freely pass out copies on a webserver, it does not become part of what many think of as the intellectual commons.
This does mean that others cannot combine it with their proprietary works though, and if they do, you have a slam-dunk copyright infringement case against them. I suggest looking in the business directory for “no win no fee” lawyers if they do this to you :-)
However, if you are in the USA and dedicate your work to the public domain, this may be possible. But that dedication is only valid in the USA jurisdiction, and that’s only when its done properly.
Saying “you may have a copy” is not legally binding; you need to state two things; one, a copyright notice - “Copyright (c) Ty Coon 2008” - and two, a copyright license.
That could be a public domain declaration, but that is no longer recommended because of the international problem, so I recommend a simple attribution license.
The web works because when you post something on a public website, you give an implicit copyright notice to download a copy for viewing it - but that is all. Google News is mired in controversy because by aggregating and republishing ‘real’ newspapers websites, it goes beyond that implicit license; Google tries on a “fair use” defense, but here in the UK there is no flexible fair use, only stiffly defined “fair dealings.”
The RIAA recently sued someone in the USA for copying music on a CD into their iPod, and this is a dumb move in the USA where fair use flexes to include this activity. In the UK, it is illegal - but fortunately politicians bought iPods already and so recognized it as stupid, so the fair dealings definition is being updated. In Sweden, politicians started using bittorrent already and so recognized that making p2p illegal is stupid, and have been in the news this week because they are working to decriminalize it.
The GPL is a “strong” copyleft license for software (although it is used for other kinds of works) and its terms are that you can only combine GPL works with other works no more restrictive than the GPL. So you can combine a GPL program with a public domain program, but not with a “non-commercial use only” program.
If you use a simple all-permissive non-copyleft license, like the Creative Commons Attribution license (“CC-BY”) then proprietors can combine your work (that is still copyright to you) with their redesign of it, and make the whole available under proprietary terms.
Therefore I recommend strong copyleft for all free culture works unless it is strategic not to; when the alternative is to have no use of the work. For example, the “MP3 killer” audio format Vorbis is released under all permissive terms to encourage its widespread adoption. My sister’s “USB music stick” portable player supports 3 formats - MP3, Microsoft Windows Media Audio, and Vorbis - and I didn’t recommend that model to her :-)
Perhaps the public domain should be retrofitted with copyleft terms! :-)
The A copyleft public domain? by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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