Expanding the Public Domain: Part Zero

Creative Commons has spent a lot of time over the past year or so strategizing, and worrying, about the current state of the public domain and its future. In particular, we’ve been thinking about ways to help cultivate a vibrant and rich pool of freely available resources accessible to anyone to use for any purpose, unconditionally.

Our copyright licenses empower creators to manage their copyright on terms they choose. But what about creators who aren’t concerned about those protections, or who later want to waive those rights altogether? Unfortunately, the law makes it virtually impossible to waive the copyright automatically bestowed on creators. The problem is compounded by the fact that copyright terms vary dramatically and are frequently extended. Additionally, new protections, like the creation of sui generis database rights in the EU, are layered atop traditional rights, making an already complex system of copyright all the more complicated. In combination, these challenges stand in the way of the vibrant public domain that CC and many others envision.

Today at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, our CEO Joi Ito will formally introduce the first of two tools designed to address these challenges. CC0 (read “CC Zero”) is a universal waiver that may be used by anyone wishing to permanently surrender the copyright and database rights they may have in a work, thereby placing it as nearly as possible into the public domain. CC0 is not a license, but a legal tool that improves on the “dedication” function of our existing, U.S.-centric public domain dedication and certification. CC0 is universal in form and may be used throughout the world for any kind of content without adaptation to account for laws in different jurisdictions. And like our licenses, CC0 has the benefit of being expressed in three ways – legal code, a human readable deed, and machine-readable code that allows works distributed under CC0 to be easily found. Read our FAQs to learn more.

CC0 is an outgrowth of six years of experience with our existing public domain tool, the maturation of ccREL (our recommendations for machine-readable work information), and the requirements of educators and scientists for the public domain. Science Commons’ work on the Open Access Data Protocol, to ensure interoperability of data and databases in particular, informed our development of CC0. It should come as no surprise that several of CC0’s early adopters are leading some of the most important projects within the scientific community.

The ProteomeCommons.org Tranche network is one such early adopter. “Our goal is to remove as many barriers to scientific data sharing as possible in order to promote new discoveries. The Creative Commons CC0 waiver was incorporated into our uploading options as the default in order to help achieve this goal. By giving a simple option to release data into the public domain, CC0 removes the complex barriers of licensing and restrictions. This lets researchers focus on what’s most important, their research and new discoveries,” said Philip Andrews, Professor at the University of Michigan.

Another early adopter of CC0 is the Personal Genome Project, a pioneer in the emerging field of personal genomics technology. The Personal Genome Project is announcing today the release of a large data set containing genomic sequences for ten individuals using CC0, with future planned releases also under CC0. “PersonalGenomes.org is committed to making our research data freely available to the public because we think that is the best way to promote discovery and advance science, and CC0 helps us to state that commitment in a clear and legally accurate way,” said Jason Bobe, Director of Community.

John Wilbanks, CC’s vice president for science, follows Joi Ito at Etech with a presentation addressing the role of CC0 in promoting open innovation.

Building CC0 into a universally robust tool has required the efforts and dedication of many over the course of more than a year. CC jurisdiction project leads in particular provided us with meaningful forums in which to openly discuss CC0’s development. They also provided jurisdiction-specific research critical to our understanding of public domain around the world. This support was invaluable to the crafting of a legally sound public domain tool for use everywhere. An overview of CC’s development and public comment process can be found on the CC wiki, together with links to our blog postings summarizing key policy and drafting decisions.

About the second tool that we refer to above, stay tuned. Funding permitting, we plan to roll out a beta public domain assertion tool this coming summer that will make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain — increasing its effective size, even if due to copyright extensions works are not naturally added to the public domain.

Note, one small improvement we’re introducing with CC0 is that its deed and legalcode are located at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. The forthcoming public domain assertion tool will also be rooted under this directory. Thanks to everyone who reminded us that the public domain is not a license, and public domain tools should not be under a “licenses” directory!

A word of thanks to our pro bono legal counsel at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Latham & Watkins. Their legal review and analysis provided the heightened level of rigor that users of our licenses and legal tools have come to expect from Creative Commons.

10 thoughts on “Expanding the Public Domain: Part Zero”

  1. This is great.

    It also makes me wonder — hey, wouldn’t it be great to have a CC license (or set of licenses) that lets people communicate what they want copyright to be now… and what they want upon their death. I could see a lot of people wanting to protect their work in certain ways while they are alive, and send everything automatically into the public domain when they die.

    Thanks for all your great work!

  2. @Jen
    You can do that right now.
    If someone writes a last will and testament, a lawyer can take care of the rest if such a provision is written in. I don’t think a separate license is necessary especially since they’re getting more and more numerous and complicated.

  3. “Our copyright licenses empower creators to manage their copyright on terms they choose.”

    Typical CCC blather. Guess what guy, I’m already “empowered.” See, copyright law protects my work and I’m “empowered” by the fact that people can’t steal my work. They require my grant of a license.

    When I want to give it away to you, I’ll let you know.

    But thanks for “empowering me.”

  4. Anne, no. The tool you link to has been around since day 1 of CC. We’ve recently revised the text a bit to emphasize certification and de-emphasize dedication since CC0 is the preferred tool for the latter. Think of the eventual PD assertion tool as being the next generation version of the certification side of the tool you link to. Sorry if that is all confusing. 🙂

  5. Hi,

    We’ve just announced a new scheme that offers to host, for free, public domain data licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 license. The scheme provides for storage of data (as RDF) as well as an API that allows the data to be search, retrieved and queried. Usage of the API is also free.

    The announcement is here:

    http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2009/03/announcing-the-talis-connected-commons.php

    And the homepage for the Connected Commons scheme is here:

    http://www.talis.com/cc

    Cheers,

    L.

  6. > Thanks to everyone who reminded us that the public domain
    > is not a license, and public domain tools should not be
    > under a “licenses” directory!

    That’s true, but it’s a shame that CC0 is not mentioned on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ at all. That page is a convenient landing page to link to when you want to tell people about the different “licenses” CC provides. It would be nice if it mentioned CC0, preferably prominently, so that there’s more awareness that CC0 exists. Perhaps something like:

    The following are the six current license choices…

    * …
    * …

    While our licenses help authors keep and manage their
    copyright on terms they choose, the CC also provides
    tools to help in the waiving of rights so that works can
    be contributed to the public domain.

    and perhaps make the text “works can be contributed to the public domain” a link to http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/

    If you like that text, consider it to be under the CC0 license – after all, I stole half of it from the publicdomain page. 😉 Oh, wait, “license” is the wrong word…

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