Crayon Licences

Software people should as a general rule not attempt to do the work of attorneys (and, if they're lucky, attorneys won't write their software). In both cases, unintentional comedy is the likely result, at best.

Your second best entertainment value on the Internet (next to Usenet kooks) is the rise of "crayon licences"¹. This is Bruce Perens's term on the OSI license-discuss mailing list for badly written, legally defective licences thrown together by coders ignorant of copyright law, usually by stripping phrases from existing licences and making word salad without knowing what they're doing.

This page will document the worst offenders, and explain why they're broken.

The Hall of Shame

WTFPL v. 2

Permissive licence so badly written that it grants rights only to the licence itself, and not to any ostensibly covered work.

Unlicense

Paragraph (and sentence) #1 professes to put the covered work into the public domain. Paragraph 2 professes to be a grant of rights normally reserved by default to a copyright owner, which makes no sense given that the preceding sentence professed to eradicate the work's quality of being ownable. However (upon reflection), in itself that would be harmless if redundant and pointless: One can interpret paragraph 2 as an elaboration of the consequences of the first paragraph.

Paragraph 3 is mostly further explanation of the concept of public domain, and therefore harmless if not useful. Its middle sentence elaborates that the erstwhile author aims to bind heirs and successors, too (which is a logical inclusion, irrespective of whether it works).

Paragraph 4, though, is the one that would be amusing if it weren't tragically broken: It's the warranty disclaimer. People accepting the covered work are obliged to accept the condition of no warranty, otherwise there is no licence. Except, oh, wait: Paragraph 1 professed to put the work in the public domain, so the erstwhile owner has sawed off and evaporated in paragraph 1 all power to require the condition in paragraph 4.

Public Domain Declaration (basically everyone's except Creative Commons's CC0)

The effect of declaring one's work public domain by personal fiat is legally non-deterministic, as it may have the intended effect in some jurisdictions but fail in others where it is known to not work (such as the UK), resulting in a silent failure to grant permission at all. Or judge might rule it to have some other effect. The work's user has to roll the legal dice to find out, which is exactly what you as a creator do not want to achieve with licensing.

The fundamental problem is that some very powerful commercial interests have ensured that copyright arises automatically (the Berne Convention treaty) and persists because that is enormously profitable, and so there's a built-in bias in the law, all around the world, to preserve that abstract property.

Of course, material does go into public domain through expiration of copyright (ignoring for a moment copyright term extensions passed every time Disney is about to lose the first Mickey Mouse film), but there are complications that can arise from attempting to make that happen sooner through an act of will.

If you wish to see further exploration of this topic, I've put what I've found on the subject here: 'Public Domain' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Licensing_and_Law/ .

Note on that page that you can get the approximate effect desired from a 'public domain dedication' using a one-line simple licence, like this:

Copyright (C) 2016 Owner Name. Do whatever you want with this work.

However, a long succession of people think that's not good enough and think they can magick away the global copyright regime. (Because litigation costs money and nobody sues without something valuable at stake, there is scant caselaw about 'public domain dedications'.)

What a Successful Licence Must Cover, and Why

Every one of these bad licences has a good intention behind it. Usually, that's "I don't want a complex legal document. In fact, I want to give the world my work without my name or a copyright notice on it. I'd like copyright to go away."

Copyright (C) 2008-2015 Rick Moen, <rick@linuxmafia.com>. Reprint rights will be gladly granted, but please ask, so I can know where this work appears.

¹
No, that is not a misspelling. American English uses the spelling 'license' for both the noun and verb forms, but Commonwealth English draws a distinction: It's 'a licence' and 'to license'.

²