A public copyright license (or public license) is a license by which a licensor can grant additional copyright permissions to licensees and in which the licensees are unlimited. In other words, when a public copyright license is applied to a work, it can be used by any person according to the conditions of the license.

The New York Times also described these as open copyright licenses, although this causes confusion with free, libre and open licenses, which are a subcategory of public copyright licenses.

An example of a non‒public copyright license is the (now deprecated) Creative Commons Developing Nations License, which only lessened restrictions on people living in certain countries (not unlimited licensees).

Narrower definition

The Open Knowledge Foundation has used a narrower definition of a public copyright license, which is that the licensors as well as the licensees are unlimited. In other words, any person could apply the public copyright license to their works. Compare to the UK Open Government License, which would need to be re-written to be used by anyone other than the government of the United Kingdom. This wiki uses the broader definition.

The Open Definition describes copyright licenses where the licensors are limited as “non-reusable licenses”: http://opendefinition.org/licenses/

See also