I've been thinking about a side project. What is it about?
Creating a set of completely absolutely public domain very essential resources such as fonts, soundfonts, palettes and so on. Resources that are perfectly legal proof and have no conditions at all for their usage to allow absolute freedom of creation.
Why? Because an "advanced" society apparently should have at least some completely unrestricted essential building blocks for art. Almost any """free""" font is distributed under SIL """free""" font license that still has some conditions, even such things as COLORS in a palette or a few character bytebeat formulas are too often licensed CC-BY-SA, which is absolutely laughable. Yes, I am aware it is probably legal to use palettes without giving credit, but you never know when laws will change and the fact alone that the author shows a will to "defend" their palettes are very discouraging to their use.
There have to be essential building blocks that are NOT """PROTECTED""" in any way. Resources allowing to be simply copy pasted, broken and sold without any fear whatsoever. These resources are like words for artists, and we need to let them speak freely.
I am now not saying every font should be public domain (even if I think so), but that there need to be at least SOME that reject the very idea of """protecting""" letters of text, colors of pixels or sounds of tones.
I've been keeping a personal list of such resources here, but many resources simply don't exist yet or have issues such as unclear sources and licenses/waivers. Therefore I've been thinking about creating some of these myself, the right way, and I would be glad if anyone joined me.
guidelines
The goal for these works is to be as much certainly public domain as possible. Therefore each resource should follow these rules:
1. Be made completely from scratch, not using parts of any other work, so that the sources are absolutely clear, which shouldn't be difficult as the resource should be the basic building blocks themselves. Being a derivative work complicates things legally.
2. Be made and signed by a single person to make the source and waiver absolutely clear. If there are multiple authors the probability of legal complications is greater. That means if you're e.g. creating a MIDI soundfont, you can't use someone else's sound recording even if they're CC0, you need to record your own.
3. Be very clearly released under Creative Commons 1.0. CC0 is a standard waiver for the public domain that should waive copyright worldwide. This waiver needs to be stated clearly, with full waiver name and an url, best if used in a sentence such as "I, <name>, have created all of this work myseld in <year> and release all of it under Creative Commons 1.0 (url), public domain." As CC0 doesn't waive other IP, you can use additional waiver alongside CC0. The evidence of the work's waiver should be archived, e.g. by saving a snapshot of the release page on the Internet Archive. You should state that you created everything yourself from scratch and also how you created it. This is again to make the source and PD status completely clear.
4. Be made with free software as proprietary SW sometimes has sneaky conditions burried in EULAs, which may impose limitations on works created with the SW (see e.g. Warcraft Reforged world editor scandal).
As a guideline, imagine the worst case scenario, i.e. that someone uses your resource commercially to create e.g. Nazi propaganda material and makes billions of dollars on it -- ask yourself whether he is still well protected from you winning a court case against him. The answer should be yes.
what we need
If someone creates a work for this project I'll add it here. Keep in mind that multiple resources of the same type are welcome, i.e. if someone creates a monospace vector font, you can still create your own -- it's always better to have more. Also feel free to suggest item types to add here.
- fonts
- sans-serif
- serif
- monospace
- sans-serif
- palettes
- MIDI soundfonts
- icons and other simple pictures (general symbols, OS icons, cursors, emoticons, avatars, ...)
- sound effects (clicks, success/fail sounds, ...)