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 Manifesto has its heart in the right place as it objects to some of the unjust extensions of copyright power, so Richard Stallman wish he could support it. However, it falls far short of what is needed.

It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). This system also ensured that, when the work’s copyright expired, you could tell from any copy that this was so—by simply adding the duration of copyright to the date printed in the work’s copyright notice. The Berne Convention, however, changed all that by replacing the assumption of freedom with the assumption of monopoly, and it now takes extensive research to be sure a work is public domain.

Last week, the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK sent a threatening letter to a Wikimedia volunteer regarding the upload of public domain paintings to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.

The European Commission has published a review of the Europeana digital library (remember that?). There's one critically important section, which touches on the hot issue of digitising public domain content:

DNS (Domain Name Server) is basically a system to convert domain names
into IP addresses. Domain names are easier to understand, memorize and write for humans while computers only use IP addresses to communicate.Most of the people using OpenDNS as the first alternative, But Now Google Public DNS is available and the performance is much better.

DJB (Daniel J. Bernstein), author of qmail, djbdns has announced in a conference Sage Days 6, declared all of his past and future code will be released to public domain.

RubyWeekend #2 contest is taking place this weekend, July 25th. Compete with others to create a game in Ruby in two day.

License allowed: Public domain or OSI approved for source code. Media must be CC or public domain.

When writing earlier this week about Adobe's sponsoring of the SQLite project, I ran into a complicated issue: is software released into the public domain also open-source software?