{"action":"opened","issue":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/issues/46","repository_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy","labels_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/issues/46/labels{/name}","comments_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/issues/46/comments","events_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/issues/46/events","html_url":"https://github.com/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/issues/46","id":141190364,"number":46,"title":"Public Domain code and licensing","user":{"login":"malanthomasii","id":17871038,"avatar_url":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/17871038?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii","html_url":"https://github.com/malanthomasii","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/malanthomasii/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"labels":[],"state":"open","locked":false,"assignee":null,"milestone":null,"comments":0,"created_at":"2016-03-16T06:57:00Z","updated_at":"2016-03-16T06:57:00Z","closed_at":null,"body":"As is noted in the policy, code written by an employee of the government in the course of their duties is not copyrightable and thus would be released as public domain. However, it is worth remembering that this noncopyrightability is a specific effect of _United States_ copyright law and would not necessarily apply abroad.* This is particularly important given that national-level use cases will naturally be of interest to foreign government users. Therefore, a fallback license should be prepared for those foreign users who will need one. Given that the code is otherwise public domain, a CC0 license would appear to be appropriate and avoid confusion.\r\n\r\nIt would, of course, be wildly inappropriate to use an open source release or open source development with non-employee contributions to impose a license on the code that is more restrictive than it would otherwise have (i.e., to domestically employ a non-public domain license on any codebase primarily developed in-house by federal employees).\r\n\r\n*Wonk aside: The only common exceptions would be countries that both observe the rule of the shorter term and consider noncopyrightability in the country of origin to be equivalent to a zero-length term . . . and any programmer should know better than to assume that what happens when you compare an empty set with a numerical value will be the same in all languages and environments. ;)"}}