[License-review] CC0 decision process, waiting for CC response, etc.

[Kuno Woudt]

On 22/02/12 03:34, Karl Fogel wrote:
> It might help to take a step back and think about how CC0 could be
> useful to open source.  I had thought of it primarily as part of the
> answer to the many "But what about the public domain?" questions we see
> (at OSI and elsewhere).  But there may be ways to answer those questions
> even without CC0 being an OSI-approved license.

One of the things I value about CC0 is that it also deals with EU Database
Rights.  For those not familiar with database rights:  In europe database
rights exist separately from copyright, and are granted automatically on
creation of the database (like copyright, there is no need to register).

Most free software, open source and free culture licenses do not consider
database rights.  I am not a lawyer, so when receiving a dataset or
database covered by such a license from a European person or organization
it is not be clear to me if I have been granted permission to modify and
redistribute the database as a whole or only the individual entries in the
database.

CC0 thus has a lot of value to me as a European when it is applied to
databases, and my understanding is that it is used quite a lot for this
purpose by the scientific community.  

Authors of existing open source software may want to incorporate parts of
CC0 published datasets into their software.  They may want to keep the
CC0 PD dedication + fallback license on that part of their work so that
their users receive the same rights to it the authors received.  It would
be nice if they could keep calling their software open source :)

So, I agree with Carl Boettiger that applying CC0 to software is quite
useful to those people and organizations already working with CC0 datasets
or other works, who want to incorporate software into those works or the
other way around.

-- Kuno.
ps.  I am new to this list, not a lawyer, just an interested free software
developer.  It has been very interesting to read the discussion about CC0,
and I am looking forward to reading the response from creative commons on
the patent issue.