{"id":"CC-PDDC","title":"Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification","reviewed_on":"2026-09-22","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-data/main/text/CC-PDDC.txt","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"The record models the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification, the instrument Creative Commons published before CC0. It is a dedication, so it is modelled like Cc010Universal: every act is permitted, nothing is required, and dalicc:ChangeLicense is a permission. Two things a reader should know: the text has no warranty or liability clause of its own, and it is half a certification about somebody else's work, which the vocabulary cannot express.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"info","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"File name, identifier, SPDX identifier and IRI agree. CC-PDDC is the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification, the instrument that preceded CC0, and the library held no record of it. It is not a version of anything the library holds, so it carries no dalicc:variantKind and no relation.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"One odrl:AssetCollection of dct:type dalicc:CreativeWork. Unlike Cc010Universal, which also carries dcmitype:Dataset, this text says nothing about a database right: it speaks only of copyright, so only the creative-work type is written.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The dedication reads: \"the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived\" That is the full permissive set with nothing held back: odrl:reproduce, odrl:distribute, odrl:display, odrl:present, odrl:modify, odrl:derive, cc:DerivativeWorks, dalicc:ModifiedWorks, cc:CommercialUse, dalicc:chargeDistributionFee, and dalicc:ChangeLicense as a permission, which is what Cc010Universal carries and what family rule 15 requires of a dedication.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The record carries no prohibition at all. The text has no trademark clause, no endorsement clause and no patent reservation, so dalicc:promote is not written. Cc010Universal does prohibit it, on the strength of its own sentence \"No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document\", which this text does not have.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The record does not prohibit dalicc:sublicense. Review decision 1 of 2026-09-15 requires that prohibition of every Creative Commons record except the CC0 dedication, and the data checks (docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md section 10) reads cc:legalcode to decide which records the rule reaches, so it will report \"CC-PDDC: no dalicc:sublicense prohibition\" until CC-PDDC joins CC_SUBLICENSE_EXEMPT beside Cc010Universal. The text states no sublicensing bar, because there is nothing left to sublicense: the dedicator relinquishes the copyright. Writing the prohibition to satisfy the validator would say something the text does not. The change belongs in the data checks (docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md section 10) and is proposed, not applied.","action":"proposed"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The record carries no duty, because the dedication asks for nothing in return. It reads: \"hereby either (a) certifies that, to the best of his knowledge, the work of authorship identified is in the public domain of the country from which the work is published, or (b) hereby dedicates whatever copyright the dedicators holds in the work of authorship identified below (the \"Work\") to the public domain\". Library conventions 6 and 7 expect an attribution or notice duty and a prohibition or a duty on every record that is not in their DEDICATIONS set; CC-PDDC belongs in that set, beside Cc010Universal, WTFPL and Unlicense. Proposed there too.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"Neither dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer nor dalicc:LiabilityLimitation is written. This text has no disclaimer and no limitation: the only sentence that speaks of liability runs the other way, against the certifier, and is quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses instead: \"Certifier recognizes that his good faith efforts may not shield him from liability if in fact the work certified is not in the public domain.\" The whole text is 1593 characters and all four of its paragraphs are quoted, so nothing of it is lost.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"The text names no legal system, so cc:jurisdiction is dalicc:worldwide. It speaks of \"an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work\", so dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual, and it has no termination clause, so dalicc:terminatesOnBreach is not written.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"The certification half of the instrument has no term. A certifier states that a work is already in the public domain, which is a statement of fact about a third party's work rather than a grant, and the deontic model has no way to say it. Proposed term: dalicc:publicDomainCertification. The paragraph is quoted in full.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check of app.services.composer against the axioms of licensedata/dependencygraph/dg_default.ttl returned no conflicts.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The nearest sibling is Cc010Universal. The two records differ in three things: CC-PDDC has no dcmitype:Dataset on its target, no dalicc:promote prohibition and no warranty or liability clause, because its text has none of the three. Both permit dalicc:ChangeLicense and ask for nothing.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Creative Commons public domain dedication","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"variant_of":null,"notes":"Modelled from the SPDX plain text. The record will make the data checks (docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md section 10) report a missing dalicc:sublicense prohibition until CC-PDDC is added to CC_SUBLICENSE_EXEMPT, and the library conventions (see the review method, docs/LICENSE_REVIEW.md section 9) report rules 6 and 7 until it is added to DEDICATIONS. Both are recorded as findings."}