Public Domain Tools

Creators that want to relinquish all copyright protections are also able to use Creative Commons licenses.

This Public Domain license (referred to as CC0) was created by Creative Commons and allows the user to utilize the work in any way they wish, and unlike the other CC licenses, no attribution is required.

This license also contains the three layers of other CC licenses with a legal code, a human-readable deed, and machine-readable metadata. A human-readable summary of this license can be found at: CC0 1.0 Universal (CC01.0) Public Domain Dedication

The CC0 license described above differs from the Public Domain Mark pictured here which Creative Commons has also created. This mark is a tool that allows work that has entered the public domain through normal copyright expiration to be labeled as such. Making it much easier to identify works that are in the public domain.

Each of these tools can be used to label work in the Public Domain but they have very different uses.

References:

“3.3 License Types / 1” (https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/chapter/3-3-license-types/) by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.