Is `This work is public domain.` insufficient?
A recipe for a cake is written on a paper and left on a bulletin board in town. It has no name and no one witnessed it being posted.
Everyone sees it and now knows how to make this cake.
The author may or may not be dead for 70 years.
Is it illegal to even document this cake recipe? You couldn't legally recount it in a news article or history text book without being able say who the author was and prove that they either granted a copy right or are known to be dead for 70 years?
Or worse, you are not only incentivised but essentially obligated to claim the authorship yourself just so you have someone to assign it to?
The thing undeniably exists regardless that the legal structure provides no place for it.
It's patently ridiculous. (guilty, terrible pun intended).
And there we come to the nuance of copyrights, at least in the US: you can't copy the text of the recipe, but the recipe itself don't have protection itself. Specifically, the text of the recipe is literature (which is protected), the recipe itself are instructions (which is not protected). This is the whole justification into clean-room design and reverse-engineering in software.
Also psuedonymous or even anonymous publications do have copyright (insert a legalheap of asterisks here). This actually sadly results into something called "orphan works", where they don't knew (or if they knew cannot find the next-of-kin/successor company/maybe even the government where the company was incorporated) where they can ask for permission.
(You can argue that there’s some legal risk at hand here; for example, if someone writes a book with the above and you start selling copies of it claiming you wrote it, the author can still come back and demand that you credit them as author and have that right enforced in court)
I think this is great. Case in point: blanket EULA for an image sharing site can not remove your right to be attributed, should your photo end up in an ad campaign or a newspaper. This means that many European newspapers actually make sure to not misattribute photographs, which has the side-effect of improving transparency in news reporting. So grabbing a photo online and wrongfully claiming it’s from the wrong time, place and source is not something that tends to happen in practice. And if it does, there’s a clear path to recourse that doesn’t require "lawyering up", you just file a claim with evidence.
Except that's exactly (legally, anyways) sane in Europe (not EU, it predates EU). Read about moral rights, and you will learn the complexities of what the US squishes into a single copyright regime.
Note: moral rights was translated from French legal term droits moraux, there's no religious meaning in moral here.
This is up to debate. I am a european resident and I think it is insane, that the reason I am not free to donate my work into the public domain is supposed to be "moral rights".
Contract your lawmaker and have them define it legally. Its undefined because there isn't money to be gained by giving stuff away and for practical purposes current solutions seem to be work good enough for practical purposes for those who want to do so robs any such movement of much momentum thus far.
Of course they are. I am not free do do with my IP as I want. (gifting it to everyone). I have to keep ownership. (even though I reject the concept of IP alltogether)
But you are right with your explanation why it is like this. There is no money in it to change it for good and current solutions work "good enough" for practical purposes (giving everyone the right to use my IP).
So I will likely also just go on use the existing solutions, instead of running against walls and trying to change the laws.
For one example, in Sweden you can never fully sign away the right to have creative work attributed to your name (until 50/70 years after creation/creator death, depending on nature of the work) as a creator. You can make a pinky promise to not claim that right, but you can’t fully waive it so you could always have a change of heart and demand to be credited by name later. IIRC this came from a notion of protecting artists and photographers from predatory contracts from the print industry or something similar.
Commercial rights etc can all be fully transferred, of course.
2) Actually, SQLite has this: https://www.sqlite.org/purchase/license
I'm glad they offer the warranty of title and take money from companies with edgy lawyers, though. $6k is small as legal fees go. It's in general a lazy monetization strategy I broadly agree with and I've been hoping GitHub under MS's stewardship would help spearhead a simple way for people/companies to buy secondary-licensed copies of software without having to contact the author about it. (I think I got the idea from Zed Shaw around the time MS bought GH.) Like, a lot of software out there isn't a mess of contributors like the linux kernel each holding their own copyright, and thus much of it can be relicensed or dual-licensed without fuss. When people license something under the AGPL or even public domain if they're copying sqlite, sometimes they include something in the readme about being open to selling an alternatively licensed version/warranty of title to companies who have some issue. But even if they don't explicitly mention it, companies can still fruitfully contact such authors and make a deal. This happens all the time on twitter of all places, with journalists asking some user (who may not even be legally identifiable from just their handle) to re-use their apparently original photo or video. Sometimes the user just gives permission, sometimes they demand "pay me", sometimes a payment is actually made. Douglas Crockford has given permission (not sure if he got any money out of it) at least to IBM to use his software for evil, again showing his infamous clause is only a problem for people who decide to make it one.
Basically, I'd rather not tell people how they can license (or not license, as per public domain declarations) their code, and while it's fine to be aware of usability tradeoffs and it's fine to know that some edgy companies or users in other countries might write you off for your choice, it's important not to overstate the actual risks involved relative to the base rate risks already out there (like patent trolls) and it's important to recognize that solving the problems in ways even the edgiest of lawyers can be mostly happy with is often possible. Having blanket policies instead of pursuing those solutions is also a choice people are free to make.
(Writing this comment led me to https://web.archive.org/web/20120510151444/http://methodlogi... which is interesting in that it could suggest how further knowledge of tradeoffs and future pushback in the beginning may have led sqlite to be put under a license, however I don't suppose anything legally stops the authors agreeing to relicense in a new version since they retain a clean title, it's just there's no compelling practical reason like seeking more contributors.)