US Government and CC0

[John Wilbanks responds via his blog to tweets by Ed Summers and Mike Eisen] “So this happened yesterday, and it’s a good thing. But note Mike Eisen’s question below Ed Summers’ tweet... [tweet 1 by Ed Summers] ‘*wow* smithsonian has started releasing data using cc0 on github ... & it’s getting forked and merged already...’ [tweet 2 by Mike Eisen] ‘@edsu @sebchan @wilbanks as federal entity aren’t they required to release under cc0 ...’ [The response from John Wilbanks] The question of federal entities and CC0 is a thorny one, depressingly.  US Government works are by default in the public domain from a copyright perspective, but that status only holds in the United States. This is kind of insane in an internet world, obviously. Is the work outside the United States when a citizen of Japan hosts a copy of the work on an Amazon server (US company) which is co-located in a third country for technical reasons? The USG has made it very clear to me and others on various occasions that not only do they hold copyright to US Government works outside the United States, they expect to oftentimes exercise those rights to make money through licensing. The canonical position on this is at the USA.gov page on copyright. Using CC0 effectively waives the rights internationally, harmonizing the position of the copyright status of the work inside and outside the country. That interoperability functionality was a key design factor for CC0. It’s why the waiver devolves to a license in juridsidictions where the public domain doesn’t exist the same way - it is functionally interoperable with the public domain as we know it in the US even if that public domain isn’t the legal norm in another country. I tried several times to get the USG to formally endorse CC0 while I worked at Creative Commons, most notably in testimony to the National Science Board’s working group on data. But we never got there. By the end I simply was asking to have the USG state that using CC0 was allowable if the relevant data owner inside the government was willing to do so, and we never got that explicitly either... So, for me, the fact that the Smithsonian has gone to CC0 is actually a great step. It means that data owners inside the USG have the latitude to use tools that put USG works into a legal status outside the US that is interoperable with their public domain status inside the US, and that’s an unalloyed Good Thing in my view.”