I have been encouraging people to think about Public Domain as a reasonable choice of terms under which to make their publications available.

I meet with almost universal resistance when I advance this idea. Either people refuse to consider it, or they claim to have already considered it and found it unsuitable. Or perhaps they don't understand the statement. Public domain? What!?

Either way, I'm going to stand by my guns, and try to get a short argument written down as to why Public Domain is useful and why it isn't necessarily going to wreck anyone's life.

The Case For

Positive Features

You can do whatever you want with public domain resources ! Anything. Really.

Absence of Negative Features

With an appropriately put together authorship registry, you can get "credit" for your published works while still allowing other people to do whatever they want with these works.

Considering the Case Against

But what if someone else plagiarises my work and claims it is theirs?

A plagiarist who registers a plagiarised work as original is only going to make themselves look worse when they are found out. It's all about the timestamps.

Someone can take my work, make closed source software out of it, and sell it!

That's true, but consider this: Maybe the Software Freedom battle isn't going to be won with coercion (of any kind). Maybe it will be won with quality products and convincing ethical arguments.

Someone who publishes a real whiz-bang closed source program based on your work may get ahead for a while. They will attract users who like the features of their program. Meanwhile, your program has a feature that theirs doesn't – the source is available!

Surely there is a game-theoretic stable point where everyone just goes to use the proprietary program. But this is the tragedy of the commons! There are ways to avoid such tragedies, and the mere possibility of a sad ending doesn't mean we should avoid playing the game.

Finally and perhaps most convincingly, this Argument Against also applies to BSD-style-licensed works!

I could never make money be releasing my works to the public domain

I disagree. See the Code Market page for some reasons why.

Your "authorship registry" in infeasible

Piffle. This is, essentially, an old technology: indeed, it was the way copyright used to work. People who failed to register for copyright immediately sent their works into the public domain (I think – I'll need to fact-check that).

Authorship designation is really not any different. Of course things could be souped up with PGP and the like these days if that's what people wanted.

A tentative conclusion

The Public Domain is the way to go! Everything else is totally whack (i.e. bogus)!

Note

The conclusion is only tentative because this matter really needs more consideration. Thank you for your consideration. Pleasant wishes,

--jcorneli