Primarily Public Domain

Hi! I wanted to alert you to an alternative, a new and simple license http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org which our laboratory is promoting. It is for material that is "public domain except as noted". This will allow those who monitor your site to harvest ideas for ideafeeds (http://www.ideafeeds.com). This is in fact compatible with your current (and very different) license because you can note the terms under which the original material was collected. What happens is that fair use becomes quite broad when we're not sure who the author is. So it is a pragmatic way for the information to drift into the public domain. Please consider using this license! Thank you -- Andrius Kulikauskas, Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt

I've set up a license Primarily Public Domain http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org that I suggest for this Wiki and might work for stuff like the following. Andrius Kulikauskas http://www.ms.lt

The link below is false in its implications here. Or maybe not. Andrius http://www.reversible.org/ThisPostIsPublicDomain

The link below is false in its implications here. Or maybe not. Andrius http://www.reversible.org/ThisPostIsCC/by-nc-sa/1.0

The link below is false in its implications here. Or maybe not. Andrius http://www.reversible.org/ThisPostIsCC

The Definition of "Primarily Public Domain":

Materials are deemed in the public domain, except for any express restrictions included in such Materials.

Materials are posted with respect for every party's proprietary rights.

IANAL, but it seems to me that this license says little more than "All these materials are in the PublicDomain, except for those that are not."

If I understand your intentions correctly, I think the following may be a more explicit indication of intent while still remaining simple:

Contributions of copyright-protected material to this collection by any party other than the copyright holders is prohibited.
Any copyright-protected material contributed to this collection without an explicit notice of usage restrictions is made by the copyright holders with an implicit grant of permission for all users to use the material as if it was in the public domain, including but not restricted to a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license for all users to use, cite, copy, modify, translate, and redistribute the material without restriction, and for all users to grant the same permission to other parties.
Copyright holders who wish to restrict usage of contributed copyright-protected material must provide an explicit notice to that effect at every site in the collection where the material appears. Users of the collection are prohibited from modifying such notices. Users are prohibited from moving or deleting such notices unless the associated material is moved or deleted concurrently.

Like I said, I am not a lawyer. I've written the above according to the following assumptions:

Nobody can put new work into the public domain. Authors hold copyright on their work for the entire period of protection, whether they want it or not. Material only enters public domain when the copyright period ends. (And the way things are going in the US, copyright periods will never end.)
It is important that the grant of permission be royalty-free and perpetual, or the copyright holders or their estates could change the terms later. It is also important that this permission be transferrable to people who are not using the collection.
Explicitly prohibiting contributions of work by people other than the copyright holders provides the site's operators with some protection in the event that copyrighted work gets into the collection without permission.
The collection's contribution mechanism ("Save" button or whatever) should have some notice like "By contributing material to this site, I agree to the terms of the PrimarilyPublicDomain license."

Hi. Thank you for your response! The purpose of this license is simply to document the effort to put things in the public domain. Legally, it may be that this is not possible, although lawyers from Creative Commons http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain and ibiblio.org http://www.ibiblio.org/collection.html apparently believe that new works can be put into the Public Domain.

Regardless of the law, there's a moral issue. I should be able to let people use my works without them having to ask for permission. It's wrong for any legal system to deny me this. Primarily Public Domain is a simple statement, as you write, that my work is Public Domain "except when it is not". That "except" is very important because, in practice, most works are in fact collections, and so authorship is a complex issue. The Creative Commons licenses don't address this yet. So I'm taking that up through our lab http://www.ms.lt

I agree with your points as recommendations. As such, I think it's better to implement them in practice, as people wish, but not to force them or assume them. Andrius Kulikauskas

IIRC, copyrights can be transferred only through a signed instrument. Some signing is possible via Internet, but I don't know about this one. Anyway, I'd hope that one could transfer one's copyrights into the public domain, but it might mean keeping the signed instrument on file with a lawyer or something. But then, I've seen instructions on necessary words in documents to put them into the public domain, where the writer seemed to know what they were talking about. The problem with trying to just license away your copyrights, is the same as with all open-source licenses: in some juridictions, the license may be revoked under some conditions when it can be deemed that the licensor received nothing of value in exchange for the license.

Another possibility for "Some Rights Reverved" licences would be the CreativeCommons type that are becoming more popular. ::: -- JoughDempsey