Public domain. Concise. Effective. Choose any two.
The issue is that donating to the “public domain” isn’t a thing in many jurisdictions, so if you want a license that is effective everywhere then it needs to be wordy. If you are happy to retain copyright and other rights and simply want to grant other people a license to use you work then just use MIT.
I hear this a lot, but what jurisdictions and why? On the face of it, it seems batshit insane to me that there would be a place where I can’t waive my property rights on something.
> With regard to the transferability and the waiving of the copyright the German copyright law can be considered as one of the strictest systems in the world. Main reason is the strict monistic approach the German copyright law bases on. Key feature of this approach is the concept that, in principle, the copyright/author’s right itself can neither be transferred to another person nor
waived by the author herself. The German author’s right consists of two parts, the moral rights
and the exploitation rights. The moral rights are – as a rule – personal rights that are bound to the person of the creator (or, after her death, her legal heirs), i.e. they can neither be transferred nor waived. Since moral and exploitation rights are considered as inseparable parts of the author’s
right as a whole (monistic approach) the exploitation rights cannot – in principle – transferred or waived by contract as well. However it is naturally possible to license the use of the work i.e. to transfer rights to use a protected work even on a large scale. Such licenses can practically lead
(nearly) to the same result as an assignment or waiver of rights.
Germany would be one example. Public Domain exists, but only as the state something enters after copyright expired naturally 70 years after the death of the author. You can't release things into public domain.
As for why: nobody considered that case when writing our copyright laws, and nobody bothered to change it. Copyright as designed can't be transferred (except through inheritance), to avoid exploitation of the original creator. As a consequence you can't really get rid of it, you can only grant licenses.
It's hardly the only right you can't get rid of, and CC0 tries to deal with some of them, like the right to one's one image which in the shortest possible form says that you can't create or publish a picture of a person without their consent (but as you can imagine is way more complicated than that). You could say that the German legal framework isn't about maximizing freedom, it's about maximizing happiness, and sometimes being able to give away a right or freedom will on balance cause more harm than good.
> Public domain. Concise. Effective. Choose any two.
A workaround to the "concise" problem would be a commonly understood convention for indicating that a file is CC0 with a single line comment. The officially recommended boilerplate for CC0 is painfully cumbersome:
// Available under http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0
Come to think of it, it sure would be nice if "Available under [URL]" came to be a convention for FOSS licensing in general. I'm choosing "available" rather than "licensed" because it seems as though it would be generalizable to both copyright licenses and public domain dedications. (Caveat: though I'm fairly familiar with FOSS licensing for a layperson, I'm not a lawyer and so this would need to be reviewed by a lawyer to ensure for drafting soundness.)
I try to look this up and there isn't a concrete answer. There are countries with no or unclear Copyright terms, but I cant find countries with no public domain.
One example is in Germany you can't give up all your rights (the sticky rights are often called "moral rights"). In that case you want to fallback to a permissive license.
The issue is that donating to the “public domain” isn’t a thing in many jurisdictions, so if you want a license that is effective everywhere then it needs to be wordy. If you are happy to retain copyright and other rights and simply want to grant other people a license to use you work then just use MIT.