Anti-copyright notice
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 in international copyright law, works are protected even if no copyright statement is attached to them. However, "anti-copyright" statements typically do not take the form of either sophisticated public copyright licenses or a simple dedication to the public domain; instead, they usually just encourage wide distribution. It is possible to denounce all claims to copyright in a work including moral rights in a written disclaimer.[citation needed]
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 socialist anarchist magazines and books.[citation needed]
A copyright waiver might[clarification needed] state the following:
- The author of this work hereby waives all claim of copyright (economic and moral) in this work and immediately places it in the public domain; it may be used, distorted or destroyed in any manner whatsoever without further attribution or notice to the creator.
Woody Guthrie 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.[1]
Despite this, a number of organisations claim copyright of Guthrie's songs.[2]
Most people[citation needed] would regard "anti-copyright" notices as being equivalent to a dedication of material into the public domain (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 Wikipedia. In such a case anti-copyright is not a true denial of copyright, but just a modification of the protection it affords copyright holders.
