We are publishing today for comment our new Public Domain Mark, a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s PD status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC0 or our licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain copyright status, not change a work’s current status under copyright.
A project being undertaken by Curtis+Cartwright with JISC funding in 2009, exploring the legal issues associated with the sharing and reuse of library catalogue records.
You can use this website to clarify and advance your understanding of what you are entitled to do with the bibliographic records which you hold within your institutional library catalogue.
ISWC2009 Tutorial on Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web http://www.opendatacommons.org/events/iswc-2009-legal-social-sharing-data-web/
We believe that dedicating data to the public domain is the best way to ensure that data is universally reusable and remixable. When data is public domain it means that it can be reused automatically without needing to check terms and conditions or track the source of every statement to provide attribution. These kinds of things act as friction to reuse, wasting energy that could be better spent creating inspiring things.
Today's announcement by the Open Knowledge Foundation of the release of version 1.0 of the Open Database License (ODbL) will create resentment in both professions- information technologists need to understand some of its complications, and lawyers will need to understand some technological limits of the license. In this post, I will try to articulate what some of the hard bits are.