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Inclusion of third-party content obtained under a license not listed above will have to be approved by the Project Steering Committee and by the Jasig Board of Directors. The groups will need to determine which general Category (A, B, or X) the license falls into, and make its decisions accordingly.

Public Domain

Using content that is in the Public Domain does not require a license. Being in the Public Domain means the material is no longer copyrighted and all the concerns about licensing those copyrights are no longer an issue. Material that is truly in the Public Domain is completely compatible with Jasig projects and can be considered to be in the Category A list.

However, it is important to ensure that the content genuinely is in the Public Domain before consuming it as such. The primary way that content enters into the Public Domain is when the term of the copyright expires – this may take as long as 120 years, depending on the domain and the locale. For a copyright holder to put intellectual property into the Public Domain before the copyright term expires is much harder than it sounds. Many jurisdictions have strong copyright protection laws and make it quite difficult for someone to waive those rights entirely.

For our purposes, it is highly desirable for Public Domain material to be declared as such by the copyright holder through the Creative Commons CC0 process. This provides us with both a thorough declaration of Public Domain status, as well as a very liberal license in case the waiving of copyright is not effective. When seeking to use material that has been poorly dedicated to the Public Domain, please work with the original copyright holders to strengthen this dedication through tools like CC0.

See the Creative Commons Public Domain Tools area for more information about best practices for placing intellectual property into the Public Domain.