Potential copy for comprehensive boilerplate for USG to release as public domain

[NoahKunin]

How does one address hybrid works [staff/contractor] [using open-licensed works/stuff already in public domain].

Here's one idea:

Statement of Purpose

The work in this package is dedicated to the public domain.

Copyright Waiver

This package contains work of the United States Government, its contractors, and the public.

Work of the United States Government is in the public domain within the United States. [Agency Name] permanently waives all copyright and related rights in the work worldwide.

[Agency Name] is given unlimited rights to work delivered under contract, which includes the right to use, disclose, reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, and perform publicly and display publicly, in any manner and for any purpose whatsoever, and to have or permit others to do so.

[Agency Name] permanently waives all copyright and related rights worldwide in the portions of work in this package delivered under contract, and explicitly grants the public the right to the work to use, disclose, reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, and perform publicly and display publicly, in any manner and for any purpose whatsoever.

Where works of the public contributed to this package were given as gratuitous contributions to the United States Government, [Agency Name] permanently waives worldwide all copyright and related rights in the portions of the work gratuitously contributed by the public.

Where works of the public included in this package were licensed to the United States Government, [Agency Name] includes and refers to the relevant license governing the use of that work in this package. Nothing in this license is to be understood as the United States Government waiving copyright or related rights to the work licensed to [Agency Name].

License Fallback

Should any part of this Waiver be deemed invalid or ineffective under applicable law, such partial invalidity or ineffectiveness shall not invalidate the remainder of the Waiver, and then the Waiver shall be preserved to the maximum extent permitted given [Agency Name]'s express Statement of Purpose.

In addition, to the extent the Waiver is so judged [Agency Name] hereby grants to each affected person a license to use the work worldwide through the Creative Commons 0 (CC0) 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

[konklone]

Well this seems pretty thorough!

One question: is there any difference between what rights an agency can bestow upon the public when the USG has "unlimited rights" to a work product, vs what rights citizens have with normal domestic public domain USG original product?

(Typo: there's a "waving copyright" in there at the bottom of the "Waiving Copyright" section.)

[NoahKunin]

Thanks, typo fixed. 👋

Great question!

IMHO, unlimited rights are just that. Unlimited! But the FAR does give a definition of unlimited, which is reproduced several times above - this is the right to "to use, disclose, reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public, and perform publicly and display publicly, in any manner and for any purpose whatsoever, and to have or permit others to do so."

My read of this is that "permit others to do so" applies to all of the rights previous to it. The reason that there's also a waiver again in that paragraph is the FAR's clause on unlimited rights neither prevents nor requires there to be a potential clause in a contract that a vendor gives the USG formal copyright of the work they produced under contract, not just unlimited rights.

So, I thought it's important for the waiver to be there too, not just an explicit permission for public usage of those self-same unlimited rights.

[JoshData]

Some feedback:

• It's too bad we didn't understand FAR well enough when we wrote the doc.
• This situation opens the door to ambiguity about what data falls under which category. And the part "Nothing in this license is to be understood as the United States Government waiving copyright or related rights to the work licensed to [Agency Name]." suggests that there are parts of the package that are not license-free, which I think sort of defeats the purpose of our recommendations.
• Why not rely on CC0's public license fallback?

I'll offer some revised language, but it's going to be for a slightly different situation-

This package is composed of, and only of, works the United States Government, works delivered under contract (for which unlimited rights have been given to [Agency Name] under the terms of the contract), and gratuitous works of the public, as detailed in the package documentation, all of which have been dedicated to the public domain. Works of the United States Government are in the public domain within the United States. Additionally, [Agency Name] waives copyright and related rights worldwide in the works contained in this package that are United States Government works or works delivered under contract through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. The remaining contributors whose works appear in this package have waived copyright and related rights in their contributions worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. (The CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication can be found at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.)

[NoahKunin]

Awesome notes @JoshData, thanks! As context, I'm interpreting data to be inclusive of source code.

The only category contemplated here that we need to cover to prevent ambiguity is work which is already under a license more restrictive than the public domain - so, everything

For example, if some portion of say, Accumulo, is part of my new Project X, I will need to specify and label that Accumulo code is licensed under Apache 2.0 and remains licensed thus.

It's not that this defeats your recommendations. Rather, it's using your recommendations and incorporating them to further cover hybrid works which we often encounter.

As for a CC0 fallback, that's what I was trying to do here. The order of operations being USG Wavier -> CC0 Wavier -> CC0 Public License.

I overall ❤️ the compressed boilerplate you include here and would love to see if we can get it through Legal. I can tell you though that it will be somewhat rare for the 18F use case. Another example why - we almost always use Bower in our repos, so we'll need coverage for the fourth use case (incorporting work already under an OSS license or otherwise).

[JoshData]

Ahha, I totally get the use case now. Thanks for clarifying. Will write more later.

[JoshData]

I had a Noah/NOAA ambiguity this morning. It took me a good minute before I realized the person I was with meant NOAA...

Anyway. Maybe something like this.

Statement of Purpose:

This repository bundles public domain and openly licensed works and can be distributed in aggregate under the terms of [most restrictive license among the non-public-domain components]. The openly licensed components, typically open source libraries developed in the private sector, are indicated with LICENSE files in appropriate directories. Other components are in the public domain.

Copyright Waiver

Except where labeled with a LICENSE file, the files in this repository are works of the United States Government, works delivered under contract (for which unlimited rights have been given to [Agency Name] under the terms of the contract), and gratuitous works of the public, all of which have been dedicated to the public domain. Works of the United States Government are in the public domain within the United States. Additionally, [Agency Name] waives copyright and related rights worldwide in the works contained in this package that are United States Government works or works delivered under contract through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Contributors from the public have waived copyright and related rights in their contributions worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. (The CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication can be found at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.)

[konklone]

Seems like it'd be too easy for someone to mistake the whole package as the most restrictive license, or that someone would think the statement is granting them permission to distribute the whole package under that restrictive license (which, I guess, they have, making this more dangerous).

Instead of optimizing for that, how about optimizing for the work being dedicated to the public domain, and then delineating any exceptions?

So how about a Statement of Purpose like:

The work in this package is dedicated to the public domain.

This package also incorporates some externally developed, openly licensed components, which are clearly marked with a LICENSE file in the appropriate directories.

[JoshData]

The work in this package is dedicated to the public domain.

Not all of the works, though.

[tvol]

"Except where otherwise noted" (or similar) might be added to the phrase

[NoahKunin]

@JoshData jumping on these notes today, all good.

[konklone]

Just making sure the participants here see the POD thread on licensing over here.

[NoahKunin]

I'm going to roll this into real production (i.e. a real procurement) this week. Any last comments are welcome. @JoshData @konklone

[vdavez]

These two paragraphs, although they make sense to me, could be confusing to a person unfamiliar with the concept of pull requests.

Where works of the public contributed to this package were given as gratuitous contributions to the United States Government, [Agency Name] permanently waives worldwide all copyright and related rights in the portions of the work gratuitously contributed by the public.

Where works of the public included in this package were licensed to the United States Government, [Agency Name] includes and refers to the relevant license governing the use of that work in this package. Nothing in this license is to be understood as the United States Government waiving copyright or related rights to the work licensed to [Agency Name].

Specifically, it can be confusing that there's a difference between "gratuitous contributions" and "licensed" open-source code. You should, instead, specify that works that are original and contributed to the Government work specifically are accepted with the condition that the contributor has given unlimited rights to the Government and that the Government will waive them.

Otherwise, "gratuitous" could be construed in a way that's different from what we understand it to mean.

Does that make sense?