American copyright law has statutes for copyright restoration (or rulings that will act as it) and extensions. So, why don’t we necessarily have a procedure for the author to willingly terminate their copyright of a work and give it to the public domain? By formal, I mean an application you have to fill out to act as proof. Don’t forget to keep a scan of it on your website in case the physical form gets lost.
Joe Baugher’s 100,000+ word article (last updated on 3/30) called “Issues in American Copyright Law and Practice” mentions a term called dedicated works. That section says that an author must give a clear indication they are giving up all the copyrights to a work permanently. For it to be clear, I would not put in legalese but basic English like the below notes.
Notes-my take on a clearly-worded statement would be something akin to “this work is being dedicated to the public domain, so I am relinquishing all rights. I simply ask that I am credited as the author/illustrator on the cover page. My heirs are not to use any tactics, such as trademarks, to restore said work’s copyright. If my heirs want to respect my wishes, they will not do this. If they do, I give my permission to any necessary suits/trials. Below is a form for that with my signature.”
For the decision to later withdraw the dedication, I would something like “I may decide to enforce the copyrights later on but my blog or website will indicate when that could start” statement on the notice.
The CC0 License, in practice, only says that the creator doesn’t intend right now to pursue copyright claims. That’s a fairly low bar in legal terms. And there are a lot of concerns whether this actually means anything under current US copyright law.
E.g., Joe Shmoe release something with a CC0 License. 3 months later he dies. His heirs decide that there’s money to be had and start enforcing the copyright. Can they do this? Since there is no official USPTO way to formally assert putting something into the public domain, the issue falls over into contract law. Legal fees ensue.
Copyright law also covers secondary rights. What if someone makes a trivial change to something under CC0, copyrights that, and starts suing anyone putting out something similar?
As to the OP: Recent US copyright laws are basically written by lobbyists for major rights holders. Those people can’t wrap their minds around someone wanting to put something into the public domain so it doesn’t occur to them to add a formal method to the texts they feed their congresscritters.
Changing one aspect of copyright laws, such as adding a pulbic domain clause, allows people to add amendments to the bill for other changes which quickly gets messy for all involved. Many would just as well avoid the whole thing.
I’m not sure that you’re right that an author CAN’T declare work to be in the public domain on his own, but I AM certain that your idea that an author be able to RESCIND such a declaration later is absolutely nuts across the board.
In addition to the problem that you would have to make a law that people using a work that they THINK is in the public domain, would have to guess where the original owner placed his notice that he “changed his mind,” which is impractical in the extreme, we would ALSO have to change the fundamental meaning of the word and concept of “ownership,” such that no one could ever again be able to legally transfer ownership to anyone.
Why, if your goal is to be clear, would you specifically avoid clear language? That’s what legalese is: Language that’s specifically designed to be as clear as possible. And one of the hurdles to becoming a lawyer is that most people are really, really lousy at using and understanding clear language.
All my life’s publications are on my web site as pdf files. This means anyone can download them. I guess that doesn’t mean they are in the public domain, but it clearly means that I am not pursuing my rights.
Many of them are claimed to be owned by the publisher. But until around 1980 no publisher had ever asked me to sign a copyright transfer form and after around 1994, I signed but reserved the right to post them. So only for that 14 year period that the publishers have any standing. And the two books in that period went out of print and the publishers explicitly returned the copyrights in those cases. No publisher has ever asked me to take down the posted papers. My main interest is dissemination, not royalties.
Disagree. I think legalese is often very precise but not necessarily clear (as in easy to understand). In fact, if people have trouble “understanding clear language” then the language is, by definition, not clear.
@Chronos: legalese may be easy to understand for those that have invested their time in it, but to the avg. person it is like a foreign language to them. That’s why I would put in in Basic English.
Legalese is incomprehensible to a lot of people. The problem is, as Richard Pearse notes, it has to be precise to avoid… well, shenanigans.
Imagine the law said “A person must not drive a vehicle faster than the posted speed limit”. As in, that was literally the law as it appeared on the statutes.
Seems pretty clear and straightforward, right? But what about if the car was rolling down a hill in neutral and the driver wasn’t using the accelerator? What about if the vehicle in question was a bicycle? Is that a vehicle? Do you drive one? The law only says you must not drive a vehicle, and since you ride a bike… see how this goes?
Very quickly, something that seems very straightforward and clear ends up needing additions. Like “For the purposes of this legislation, a vehicle is described as any wheeled conveyance powered by an engine, motor, manual power, electricity, or similar energy source” and “Drive means to be in control of the vehicle, including but not limited to operating the steering wheel, accelerator, brakes or other controls”. You get the idea.
That’s why “Don’t drive your car over the speed limit” ends up becoming an entire page of writing, basically.
If you followed my Wikipedia link and related pages and checked around you’d quickly see that in the US and apparently some other countries there is no formal mechanism for dedicating a work to the public domain. From my link: “CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible. Or, when not legally possible, CC0 acts as fallback as public domain equivalent license” Note: “equivalent”.
For the page on public domain equivalent licenses: "Public domain equivalent licenses exist because some legal jurisdictions do not provide for authors to voluntarily place their work in the public domain, but do allow them to grant arbitrarily broad rights in the work to the public. "
From the page on public domain: "In 2009 the Creative commons released the CC0, which was created for compatibility with also law domains [sic] which have no concept of dedicating into public domain. "
Note that the specific example of withdrawing pseudo-public domain licensing I gave wasn’t that the author withdrew the license but the heirs. Are the heirs bound by such a license under contract law? Note that this isn’t the same as a formal contract with signatures and consideration. More like an offer.
E.g., Joe Blow makes a one million dollar offer to anyone who can prove we went to the Moon. Joe died before Buzz Aldrin shows up to his door. Does Buzz have a case against the estate?
Note that people make offers and later withdraw them all the time. E.g., RSA used to offer prizes for factoring certain numbers. They the stopped the challenge in 2007 before they were all factored. Some numbers on the list were factored afterwards and the researchers collected no prize money.
How such withdrawn offers stand up legally depends on various details. It’s not cut and dried. Since no one case involving something like the CC0 License has gone thru a test case at all, let alone involving a withdrawn license, it would be premature to make a blanket statement denying that it couldn’t happen.
ftg: I’m confused. You’re talking about contracts, and those are different than other kinds of writing.
I thought “public domain” in this case involved works which have fallen out of copyright – the Harry Potter novels are still copyrighted, but The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens is in the P.D.
As for how a writer could put his writing into the public domain…it can be as simple as pushing a button, at least when you’re self-publishing on Amazon. They have a push-button/check-box for declaring that a work is public domain. I could easily put one of my own stories up that way, and push that button.
I could also write a nice letter to the Library of Congress. Why would that not be binding? Say I write a novel – “The Ghastly Example” – and send a copy to the L.o.C. with a note saying, “This novel is my own original work, and is now to be considered in the Public Domain.” Later, some other guy publishes a copy of it: what conceivable remedy do I have? I’ve given away my rights.
You can do that! You can renounce your citizenship, too. It’s not something anyone will advise you to do…but you can do it.
There is no form for this, because someone is likely to write “Tarzan” on one, and get some clerk at Warner Bros to sign it.
Copyrights are intellectual property. Property just like real estate. You want to be charitable, you assign the copyright to someone else or a charitable organization and allow them to benefit from this valuable intellectual property.
You seem to be obsessed with others giving up their intellectual property, instead of your creating your own original works as you discussed in your extensive Tarzan copyright thread. You want to offer or convert your copyrighted works, assuming you have any, to the public domain, it is a simple matter of meeting with an entertainment attorney to do this. Or contract the Library of Congress Copyright Office and ask them.
No, he’s right. The CC0 is not the public domain, and you cannot actually release things into the public domain in the US. That’s why the CC0 was invented. It release copyright using a workaround, and then has as fallback license, which explicitly grants anyone who uses the work irrevocable permission to do all the things that copyright would explicitly stop.
I don’t know the answer to the OP’s question on why such a system had to be created, instead of the there being an explicit way to release something into the public domain intentionally.
I do know his previous thread has no relevance to the answer to this one, and will once again voice my distaste for bringing stuff up like that. Your opinion of what the guy should concern himself with is of no bearing to the question, and suggests you have a personal problem.
I’d have never even known this was the same guy had you not mentioned it. There’s really no reason to even remember this sort of thing.
@edwardcoast: your argument can also be applied to the estates of literary authors. They could easily make their owns but they use TM and extensive copyright laws to milk works that should’ve been public property decades ago.
You’re not going to find much agreement around here, I’m afraid. Personally, I think copyright terms are far, far too long - but whenever the subject comes up here, the response is usually the one you’ve already observed (namely “Smeg off and write your own original stuff, you smelly son-of-a-hamster”)
For what it’s worth, I’d like to see a greatly reduced copyright period for computer entertainment software and “ephemera” - things which clearly aren’t intended to be ‘for the ages’.