CC’s new Public Domain Mark

CC announced their new Public Domain Mark this last week:

CREATIVE COMMONS LAUNCHES PUBLIC DOMAIN MARK; EUROPEANA AND CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS LEAD EARLY ADOPTION

San Francisco, California, USA; The Hague, Netherlands — 11 October 2010

Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark effectively increases the value of the public domain by making works that are already free of copyright readily accessible to the public. The Mark makes it clear to teachers and students, artists and scientists, that they are free to re-use material. Its release benefits everyone who wishes to build upon the rich and vast resources that are part of the shared public domain.

So the idea is for people to tag work in the public domain as being in the public domain, including with associated metadata. Pretty neat stuff! So in addition to a wide variety of work, databases/data that meets the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data, which calls for a public domain approach, can be tagged with the new PD Mark as well.

It’s not immediately clear how the new PD Mark relates to the proposed collective mark in the Science Commons protocol, so I’ll follow up on this one.

With this announcement, CC follows the same approach as Open Data Commons with the PDDL and including a set of non-binding norms alongside the works to inform users of certain (non legally binding) expectations around behaviour.

For reference:

• CC’s norms are at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/PublicDomainNorms
• …and the Open Data Commons norms are at: http://www.opendatacommons.org/norms/