Nonprofits are used to thinking of themselves as providers—of services, of advocacy, of societal change. Less often do they see themselves as playing a creative role, one of producing valuable content.
Yet, nonprofits are creators of media, reports, research, and so on. In this capacity, nonprofits can foster a more vibrant ecosystem of information and media by harnessing the power of the public domain.
Nonprofits are creators.
Of course, the concept of the public domain is, in some ways, subversive.
Currently, almost everything is legally locked down by US copyright law, but only entertainment corporations and a few thousand celebrity artists meaningfully benefit. And the negative side effects of broad copyright protection are tremendous—discouraging the vast majority of people from creating, weakening the rule of law, trapping individuals in overconsumption, and preventing breakthroughs.
By contrast, nonprofits’ support of the public domain would ease these societal problems and would also save them funds, increase the diffusion of their ideas, and potentially lead them to new insights.
The Copyright Trap
The idea of copyright is usually framed as protection: Copyright laws protect creators from having their work stolen or manipulated. But too often, copyright constrains free thought and expression.
First, expansive copyright deters people from creating. To make art is to borrow from others, from culture, but under current law, all expressive works—from books to blog posts—automatically receive copyright protection. This can lead to a legal copyright thicket, making it more difficult for creators to build on existing works.
Second, the legal thicket of copyright imperils those who attempt to engage in good faith with copyright restrictions, leaving individuals and organizations open to liability. A system that makes it difficult not to break the law benefits no one and slowly erodes the rule of law in general.
Embracing the public domain offers various benefits to the nonprofit sector.
Furthermore, fair use, an affirmative defense to copyright infringement that allows one to borrow from others under certain circumstances, can be legally perilous because the rules of fair use are often unclear.
Instead of relying on fair use, nonprofits can license others’ works. However, doing so takes substantial time and money, which few nonprofits have. These bureaucratic inefficiencies increase costs.
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Finally, intellectual property laws create silos of dispersed, unconnected information that could be much more socially valuable if artists, policymakers, and scientists could freely share and experiment with it.
Rethinking Copyright
Nonprofit leaders have been taught that maintaining greater control over intellectual property benefits their organizations financially and reputationally. Yet most nonprofits likely spend more time and resources guarding their creations than licensing them. Meanwhile, by restricting access to their works, organizations reduce their impact and slow the spread of their ideas.
Nonprofit leaders might also misguidedly believe that copyright guarantees that they are recognized as the authors of their work. Yet attribution, while highly important, is only a best practice, not law. Copyright law, in fact, allows one to borrow another’s idea without crediting the author. While that might seem dispiriting, it also means that an organization could release its work into the public domain without fear of losing a legal right to attribution that never existed in the first place.
Meanwhile, embracing the public domain offers various benefits to the nonprofit sector and aligns with values of transparency and accessibility—embracing the public domain will help cultivate the nonprofit ethos of sharing and assistance, not exclusion and profit.
Embracing the Public Domain
Nonprofits can take a few simple steps to embrace the public domain. First, organizations should put all their existing material under Creative Commons or similar licenses, including reports, educational material, and research. The gold standard for non-software works is the C0 license or “no rights reserved,” which puts creations into the public domain. To do this, an organization has to attach the logo, available for free from the nonprofit Creative Commons, to the work intended for release into the public domain.
Every nonprofit can contribute to keeping information open to all.
Creative Commons provides other licensing options that enable the copyright holder to retain their copyright but allow for more open use. There are additional options for software, such as the Free Software Foundation’s GNU GPL (General Public License).
Second, when hiring freelancers to write articles, scientists to generate reports, or programmers to code, nonprofits can request that the work be released into the public domain. Alternatively, when new commissions are beyond a nonprofit’s budget, it can consider using works already in the public domain. In a small way, this will help raise the visibility of the commons, as many open licenses require the license to be displayed with the work to use it for free.
Third, once the information is in the commons, organizations should talk about it. They can coordinate with others in the field to brainstorm how freely sharing work can help further their collective missions. Establishing free platforms could enable members to access information more easily and increase the chances that others will come across it.
Finally, groups can talk about what other expertise they have that could be helpful to share. For example, natural resource groups come across evidence of corruption in oil and gas deals but don’t have a way to easily share it with anticorruption nonprofits. Collaborative platforms to exchange information could get insights into the hands of those best equipped to use them. This helps to cultivate a network that refers back to the commons and could, in turn, bring in more ideas to circulate within the organization.
It’s worth noting that donating work to the public domain is not without risks. Doing so allows anyone to use material however they’d like, even if it does not align with a nonprofit’s values. But such examples are rare and generally outweighed by the many advantages of having work freely and easily disseminated.
Given how easy these steps are to implement, every nonprofit can contribute to keeping information open to all. Importantly, even though these steps are modest, they are consistent with nonprofits’ ethos of altruism and mutual aid.
