open data: public domain?

David Wiley has a useful post on the “public domain”. I had always assumed that the public domain was fairly simple – certain types of content were de facto PD, authors could easily donate their work to the PD, and that after a given period (country-dependent) the work became PD. But apparently it’s not that easy. The post is for those who love to see how the law makes simple concepts complicated – I shall only quote one snippet:

Assymetry, Hypocrisy, and Public Domain

Published by

david

at August 9, 2007

in copyleft, open content and copyright.

Thousands of people complain that the term of copyright is too long. They point out that documents like the US Constitution make it plain that the term of copyright should be finite, and that it is absolutely critical that copyrighted educational content and other cultural artifacts eventually enter the public domain. This was recently demonstrated by the way people rallied around Lessig’s challenge of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act in the US.
[…]
The critical importance of the public domain is one reason for the new Open Education License draft. Why not simply create a mechanism for putting works in the public domain? Again, quoting Lessig:

We have no direct license that you can link to so as to place your material in the public domain. This is not because we wouldn’t like to offer such a license. It is instead because the law does not make such simplicity possible. While for most of our history, there were a thousand ways to move creative material into the public domain, most lawyers today are puzzled about whether there is any way to move work into the public domain. We have tried to build a way, but it is not automatic. If you follow this link, there are a number of steps you can take to put material into the public domain. We believe that if you follow these steps, then your work is in the public domain. Again, there’s no way to be certain about this. But this is our best guess, given the murky state of the law.

PMR: I’ll leave it there. I’ll go back to trying to develop new algorithms for describing molecular structure and robotic analysis of the literature. It’s hard. But it’s easier for robots to read data than for a human to read lawyers.