Public Domain Declarations

By adding the public domain license template to your user profile page, you can ensure that your contributions to the microformats.org community wiki and mailing lists are available as openly as possible. As more users choose to adopt it, much of the wiki's content will become available under clear, free terms.

You can add it to your profile by 1) logging in, 2) clicking on your name at the top of the left sidebar, just below the "microformats" logo), 3) clicking Edit (or ctrl-E(mac)/alt-E(windows)), 4) pasting the following text into the bottom of your page, and 5) clicking Save (ctrl-S(mac)/alt-S(windows));

See the list of those that have already done so.

Why Public Domain?

In the recent past, several kinds of legal concerns have been expressed, notably in the Legal Issues and IP sections of microformats-issues (which in turn points to some mailing list threads).

One way to address some of these concerns is for individual contributors to decide for themselves if they'd like to put their own individual contributions to the wiki, mailing lists, blog, and IRC channel into the public domain. Inspired by Wikipedia, there's a new template that you can add to your profile to indicate your support for this option, which ensures the broadest possible reuse of your contributions in future discussions, specifications, and in other media (such as a book)

What difference will this make? If enough contributors eventually support this, entire pages of the wiki will become public-domain works, not just their individual snippets. All of the admins have already signed up for this, for example. If any other person or company has any qualms about citing our documents, this clarifies the legal situation considerably: no license is even required any more. Note that this can only affect copyright -- patents are another matter entirely, but at least building a thriving body of knowledge around microformats is the best response, by establishing "prior art."

Disclaimer

Unlike other efforts that might come to mind, it's important to note that microformats.org is not a "standards body" (legal sense), and that the microformats admins are not a "legal entity" (and nor do they have any official links to CommerceNet or Technorati, two companies that were influential early sponsors). For that matter, there's no bank account nor any other financial standing; if you see a hip new microformats sticker out there, it's a private donation (in that case, by Dan Cederholm. microformats t-shirts were similarly donated by sponsors.

Acknowledgements

The original inspiration for this experiment was Wikipedia's own public domain release, which was suggested on the #microformats IRC channel on 21 June 2007 by the user unfo. Microformats community co-founder Eric Meyer's placement of the microformat-based S5 slide presentation system into the Public Domain on 2005-07-28 set an important early good example, just over a month after the launch of microformats.org. Recently, Andy Mabbett's contribution of a sample Semacode image also suggested this approach. There's an FAQ about multi-licensing on Wikipedia for more information, but do note that it does not necessarily apply to microformats.org directly, since this isn't a site governed by GFDL, for example.

On 2007-07-17 Rohit Khare announced the Voluntary Public Domain declaration on the microformats-discuss mailing list.

On 2007-12-29 Tantek Çelik announced the Creative Commonse Public Doimain declaration and required public domain contributions to the microformats wiki.

Point of Contact

While community members are generally encouraged to discuss matters openly, if you have a specific legal questions, please contact Rohit Khare, who has volunteered to be the initial point of contact for the administrators, before starting a discussion on the public, archived mailing lists, IRC, or wiki, since there can be occasionally be legal implications for statements published on the microformats.org domain.