Re:Understanding Free Cultural Works
by robin_reala on Sunday April 19, 2020 @05:02AM
(#22914526)
The important thing about CC0 is that it’s an active declaration of permissivity that bypasses a bunch of the various public domain laws around the world. Just stating that something’s believed to be in the public domain is useful as a starting point but it’s not an explicit licence.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
This is a bit misleading, IMHO. The important difference between CC0 and public domain is that PD is a copyright status, while CC0 is a license. Which means you use CC0 to grant PD-like status to works you hold the copyright for. You cannot (should not) attach a CC0 to somebody else's work just because you think it is PD. And vice versa: while stating "I release my work into PD" is probably usable in the US, it is really incompatible with the continental construction of copyright; for that, the explicit granting of a "most possibly free" license is a better fit. (Even though you might doubt even CC0 is bulletproof there...)
Even stating in writing that I hereby place this code/document/etc. in the public domain doesn't work for some companies because, as you suggest, the status of public domain around the world is ambiguous. (This is basically the reason the original MIT/X Consortium license was created.)