An anti-copyright notice is a specific statement that is added to a work in order to encourage wide distribution. Such notices are legally required to host such specific media; under the

Berne Convention The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, was an international assembly held in 1886 in the Swiss city of Bern by ten European countries with the goal to agree on a set of leg ...

international copyright law While no creative work is automatically protected worldwide, there are international treaties which provide protection automatically for all creative works as soon as they are fixed in a medium. There are two primary international copyright agreem ...

, works are protected even if no

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

statement is attached to them. However, "

anti-copyright Criticism of copyright, or anti-copyright sentiment, is a dissenting view of the current state of copyright law or copyright as a concept. Critics often discuss philosophical, economical, or social rationales of such laws and the laws' implem ...

" statements typically do not take the form of either sophisticated

public copyright licenses A public license or public copyright licenses is a license by which a copyright holder as licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to any and all persons in the general public as licensees. By applying a public license to a work, pro ...

or a simple dedication to the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because those rights have expired, ...

; instead, they usually just encourage wide distribution. Depending on jurisdiction, it is possible to denounce all claims to copyright in a work including

moral rights Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work ...

in a written disclaimer. An example of an anti-copyright notice is the following: "Anti-Copyright! Reprint freely, in ''any'' manner desired, even without naming the source." Where such notices are attached depends highly on the type of work. They are often found in anarcho-socialist magazines and books. A copyright

waiver A waiver is the voluntary relinquishment or surrender of some known right or privilege. Regulatory agencies of state departments or the federal government may issue waivers to exempt companies from certain regulations. For example, a United St ...

might state the following: The Creative Commons

CC0 A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyric ...

was created for compatibility with also law domains (e.g. civil law of

continental Europe Continental Europe or mainland Europe is the contiguous continent of Europe, excluding its surrounding islands. It can also be referred to ambiguously as the European continent, – which can conversely mean the whole of Europe – and, by ...

) which have problems with the concept of ''dedicating into public domain'', as waiver statement with a fallback all-

permissive license A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, ...

. The

WTFPL WTFPL is a permissive free software license. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The title is an abbreviat ...

, first published in 2000, differs from licenses with public domain designations in that an author can use it even if they do not necessarily have the ability to place their work in the public domain according to their local laws. The

Unlicense The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license for software which provides a public domain waiver with a fall-back public-domain-like license, similar to the CC Zero for cultural works. It includes language used in earlier software projects ...

, published around 2010, has a focus on an

message.

Woody Guthrie Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (; July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) was an American singer-songwriter, one of the most significant figures in American folk music. His work focused on themes of American socialism and anti-fascism. He has inspired ...

used an anti-copyright notice on his songs:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Despite this, a number of organisations claim copyright of Guthrie's songs. Most people would regard "anti-copyright" notices as being equivalent to a dedication of material into the

(as in the second example above). Some of these disclaimers, however, are less accurate and need to be interpreted individually as the term anti-copyright has no accepted legal meaning. For example, if just free distribution is encouraged, modification or lack of attribution is still illegal, making the material ineligible for collaborative writing projects like

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...

. In such a case anti-copyright is not a true denial of copyright, but just a modification of the protection it affords copyright holders.

See also

References

See also