[PD-dev] Political Impropriety

Marc Lavallée marc at hacklava.net
Tue Jan 3 18:42:06 CET 2006


Le 3 Janvier 2006 10:45, Mathieu Bouchard a écrit :
> Hmm, possible, but then why don't people do it? Why do people use the
> MITX11 license or the SIBSD license instead of just public domain?

Because with licences you can impose restrictions, even if it's only about 
the redistribution of the copyright notice. And also because licenses are 
more explicit than the "state of no copyright".

> On Mon, 2 Jan 2006, Marc Lavallée wrote:
> > Although copyright law generally does not provide any statutory means
> > to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain, this
> > does not mean that it is impossible or even difficult, only that the
> > law is somewhat unclear."
>
> What's the advantage of using unclear laws instead of clear free licenses
> such as MITX11 and SIBSD ? I mention those two as examples because they
> are closest to public domain and it seems that their purpose is to
> simulate public domain but in a legally clearer way. (GPL/LGPL has
> additional goals that are less close to public domain).

Laws and licenses are different things. Licenses are governed by 
international and national copyrights laws. That's why it's difficult to 
write a license with an international scope, translate it, and eventually 
test it in court. Also, the public domain is not a law. It's the law that 
is unclear about the fact that a work can go directly in the public domain, 
because copyright lawyers usually works to protect their clients 
investments.

It doesn't seem too difficult to publish a work in the public domain; since 
there's 566 projects in the public domain registered on Freshmeat:
http://freshmeat.net/browse/197/

I don't think we can assume that a work is more or less in the public 
domain, where there is no conditions, not even redistributing the copyright 
notice. Even an extremely simple license like "no conditions" is 
technically expressing a condition.

Excerpt from
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses :
"Being in the public domain is not a license--rather, it means the material 
is not copyrighted and no license is needed. Practically speaking, though, 
if a work is in the public domain, it might as well have an all-permissive 
non-copyleft free software license. Public domain status is compatible with 
the GNU GPL."

--
Marc






More information about the Pd-dev mailing list