What Can I Put in the Public Domain or Share by Creative Commons License

[fekarp]

I'm creating a project homepage on the service provider ourproject.org, and I can do so if my work will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm also adding a waiver to it that it will be in the public domain from a specific date. (Well, I don't call it waiver but what I write is written.)
Now I'm getting uncertain if I can put there everything I wanted.

1.) For example, I've downloaded a public domain font from here:

http://tulrich.com/fonts/

And I created a derivative font from it, and I don't know if I can put the derivative font to the website. What happens if the original website for the ancestor font goes off the internet and it turns out that it is copyrighted in fact and have an ancestor font as well? So it's possible that I will have to create a brand new public domain font because of this uncertainty. Note that I don't want legal complications even if I am right.

But I write now for another reasons.

2.) Can I make a PDF file public domain if its underlying fonts are in the public domain? Because I think PDF is not a free file format. I want to provide something in the homepage which can be printed by anyone, and looks the same. Will I have to use images for it?

3.) Can I include ANY website URLs as links? Because I have seen a website which told that it shall only be linked in a specific format. What happens if they will decide to do so without my knowledge? Of course, I will not use link collection websites where the link collection itself is a spiritual work, I will use only individual links which I collected during some years of my browsing (and maybe users can enter new links too in the future). Anyway, are link URLs in the public domain?

4.) Can I mention the names of supermarkets SPAR, TESCO, etc. there, with some - maybe positive, maybe negative - information about their wastage of advertising magazines? In 2009, they allowed me to put that on my own Hungarian website, and to an environmentalist website as well, but that was not about licensing this work of mine for everyone. I want to provide a link to SPAR's statement to the press too about SPAR decreasing the amount of advertising magazines (and this link will be public domain together with my website).

5.) Plus: I have even written some articles to a website and at the bottom of these articles were that they are in the public domain, while at the bottom of the big website itself was that it is copyrighted and all rights reserved. I have even written an email to the site boss of that website, to reply to all and tell the other website (ourproject.org) that he agrees that my works are in the public domain - he wrote back and agreed. Is this enough?

6.) Why cannot we copyright something to the public domain?

This is a combined post about copyright law, licensing and others.

[flyingron]

We can only address US law here, so the following is limited to the US. I got about half of this answered before you started mentioning UK supermarket chains and Hungary, so I'll keep going.

The first issue is that "TYPE FACE", that is the rendition of the letters on the page is NOT COPYRIGHTABLE anyhow. So you can make all the copyrighted or public works you want with any font be it from a commercial source or public domain without worrying about it. The font, i.e., the computer information necessary to generate a type face at a given size and position on the page, can be copyrightable.

If you make a derivative font from a public domain font, at worst you just have another public domain font. At best, you might have enough content to make your additions copyrightable.

List of URLs should be fine (even if they are directly linkable).

You can use trademarks in a descriptive fashion in your text without worrying about it.

Putting copyright notices on public domain stuff does not make it copyright protected. In the US, there's technically nothing wrong with doing this, but you won't get very far trying to enforce rights that don't exist.

Copyright only extend to things you create. You get copyrights by expressing the allowable material in tangible form. You don't have to do anything. Copyright is the recognition of intellectual property rights on the creation. It's not some padlock you can run around and hang on stuff you didn't create to lock it down. You can't subsume copyrights on stuff already created (whether it be public domain or owned by some other creator).

[fekarp]

Thanks! I'm aware that this is an U.S. forum, but I'm interested in U.S. law too, as it is a complex issue and it may be connected to the U.S. or international law system more than the Hungarian one. For example, my question about the PDF document format. Here they describe that PDF is a proprietary file format designed by Adobe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF

I think you misunderstood my question: it is not about fonts, but it is about the PDF document format itself, provided that it has public domain fonts. (If the PDF incorporates proprietary fonts then the PDF cannot be in the public domain because the user would extract those fonts from the PDF.) So my question:

Can ANY PDF be in the public domain if it is a proprietary file format? What does a proprietary file format mean? For example, GIF images are a proprietary file format too (and that's why PNG images were created to avoid the use of GIF, according to WikiPedia.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

[flyingron]

PDF is an open standard now. Even when Adobe held PDF proprietary, the copyright extended only to the specification, though there were a few patents involved as well.
PDF documents do not contain fonts. They contain representations of them. A proprietary font used to create a PDF document does not make the document proprietary.

The issue with GIF was a patent. The images themselves weren't proprietary, just the compression scheme used to pack and unpack them. The Welch patent used in the GIF compression has been expired for several years as well.

[fekarp]

Well, this Wikipedia entry says that the patents to PDF are licensed freely, but not public domain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf

I think it is probable that they only apply for the programs that read/write PDF files, but I don't want a mistake: it's better to be cautious.
Well, I believed until now that PDF documents do contain fonts; now I'm more uncertain as I see that there are "standard 14 fonts":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Fonts

As for fonts, they are either in the public domain, or it seems that a printed PDF cannot be in the public domain. They say it can, but then how is it prohibited to scan the document, extract its fonts?

[flyingron]

I've been involved in intellectual properties in the software publishing industry for 30 years. You can throw up all the smoke screens you want but you have to believe me that I know what I'm talking about.

PDF files are not themselves covered by patents. The encoders and decoders may be but that doesn't enforce any Adobe (or whoever) IP on your PDF works. PDF files DO NOT CONTAIN FONTS. They contain REFERENCE to a font. The fact that the encoding "Times Roman 14pt" occurs in the document isn't a font. It just says what type face should be used when the document is displayed. The "standard 14 fonts" are those that you can expect all the PDF readers to implement. The fonts are contained within that software (or the system that it resides on).

PDF documents are not beholden to anybody other than the creator. If the creator of the document places it in the public domain, it is in the public domain. I don't know what you are trying to argue? Who says it's prohibited to scan a document. And PLEASE UNDERSTAND WHAT I ALREADY TOLD YOU: The visual appearance of the letters on the page is the TYPE FACE. The TYPE FACE can not be protected by copyright. If you reproduce a document by scanning or just dumping it the Xerox machine and pressing the big button the type faces aren't going to be an issue (the underlying words, etc... which can be protected by copyright are).

[Conrad Hunter]

Ron brings up a excellent and central point. PDF documents, like website html pages do NOT contain any fonts. The font is from your computer when the page is displayed. If the page uses some unusual font that your compute does not have, it will substitute a default font like Times Roman. But most pages are done in common fonts and you never know the difference. If you have a full version of Adobe or another licensed program that will let you open and edit a PDF file, and it contained a font you didn't have, it would tell you the missing font and what is being substituted.

Trying to scan a document and turn the letters into a font would be a copyright violation but would also be far more trouble then it is worth. You can purchase most fonts for $30 or less. Creation of a font is not an easy task.

[flyingron]

Trying to scan a document and turn the letters into a font would be a copyright violation but would also be far more trouble then it is worth. You can purchase most fonts for $30 or less. Creation of a font is not an easy task.

Well, scanning a copyrighted document might be a copyright violation, just as making any copy might be.
However, scanning in printed characters and turning them into a FONT is NOT going to be a copyright violation EVER.
The visual rendition of the letters are a TYPE FACE. TYPE FACES can not be copyright. I can go take my licensed copy of the MONOTYPE TrueType Helvetica font, print out all the letters, scan them in and do whatever I darn well please with them. The copyright is embodied in the font, i.e., the program to generate the type face given certain parameters. The typeface itself is NOT. Of course, I have a bigger issue if I want to call it Helvetica, as that is the trademark of a German printing machine company but pretty much exclusively licensed by linotype).

Ron the Type Geek

[fekarp]

I've been involved in intellectual properties in the software publishing industry for 30 years. You can throw up all the smoke screens you want but you have to believe me that I know what I'm talking about.

PDF files are not themselves covered by patents. The encoders and decoders may be but that doesn't enforce any Adobe (or whoever) IP on your PDF works. PDF files DO NOT CONTAIN FONTS. They contain REFERENCE to a font. The fact that the encoding "Times Roman 14pt" occurs in the document isn't a font. It just says what type face should be used when the document is displayed. The "standard 14 fonts" are those that you can expect all the PDF readers to implement. The fonts are contained within that software (or the system that it resides on).

I'm sorry, but you know this information wrongly. Doc and Odt documents really do not contain fonts, that's why they use PDF instead. PDFs contain fonts if you use a font which is not of the standard 14 fonts. An example: I created a font. I used it in an OpenOffice document. I exported it as PDF. I put the PDF onto a pendrive, and in the town I paid that they print it. Of course, their system know the font because it was part of the PDF, and not of the computer. That's why the PDF's name: "Portable" Document Format. I need more qualified legal helpers.

PDF documents are not beholden to anybody other than the creator.

This would be a valuable information for me if you could prove it by good internet law links. I'm also considering putting the contents of two of my old PDF documents (with standard fonts) onto my website, but I want to be 100% sure, otherwise it's possible that I will put them on the net in HTML.