Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification

Also known as CC PDDC, CC-PDDC, Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification, Public Domain Dedication and Certification.

Commercial use: allowed
Share alike: not required
Attribution: not required

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Write this as a license text (needs an account) DALICC reads the model above and writes what it permits, requires and prohibits in plain English. Without an account, the Text download above writes the model out from the vocabulary.

Canonical URI https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/CC-PDDC

Permissions

Change license from the text
Charge distribution fee from the text
Commercial use from the text
Derivative works from the text
Derive from the text
Display from the text
Distribute from the text
Modified works from the text
Modify from the text
Present from the text
Reproduce from the text

Prohibitions

This license states no prohibitions.

License-wide duties

This license states no duties that apply to the work as a whole.

What applies by default

The statements above are the library's reading of this license: each is marked with the sentence it rests on, or as a library convention where the text is not explicit. The statements below are the ones the DALICC reasoner supplies for acts the license says nothing about, from the default rules of the dependency graph it reasons with. Each one names the legal source it rests on. None of it is in the record.

Promote by default rule (adopted)

This license says nothing about Promote, and the graph applies this reading in all jurisdictions it covers: it is not permitted unless the license permits it.

A licence that says nothing about endorsement is read as not allowing it: the licence gives the licensee no right to use the licensor's name or marks in a way that states or implies that the licensor endorses the licensee or its product, while stating truthfully that a work is based on or uses the licensed work is a different act that this rule does not decide. A copyright licence grants rights in the work, and the right to use a name or a trademark is a separate right under trademark law and the protection of names, which a silent copyright licence does not pass on. Combining a licence that is silent about endorsement with one that permits it shows a conflict marked as coming from this rule.

Basis Trademark and name rights are separate from copyright: Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 article 9 lets the proprietor of an EU trade mark prevent all third parties not having his consent from using the sign in the course of trade, and Directive (EU) 2015/2436 article 10, 15 U.S.C. 1114 and 1125(a), section 12 BGB and section 43 ABGB protect marks and names in the same way. The library's evidence is Creative Commons 4.0 section 2(b)(2): Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License. A copyright licence that is silent grants no right to use the licensor's name or marks to suggest endorsement (Worldwide)

Clauses

Additional clauses

The person or persons who have associated work with this document (the "Dedicator" or "Certifier") 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. A certifier, moreover, dedicates any copyright interest he may have in the associated work, and for these purposes, is described as a "dedicator" below.

Info

Target asset types: Creative work (i.e. text, picture, sound, movie)
Region / jurisdiction: Worldwide
Validity: Perpetual
Source: https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-PDDC.html
Legal code: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
This description is published under: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Publisher: Creative Commons
SPDX identifier: CC-PDDC on the SPDX license list
DALICC identifier: CC-PDDC

This record is published under CC BY 4.0. Credit it as: DALICC License Library, DALICC - Verein zur Förderung der Rechtssicherheit in der Datenbewirtschaftung, https://dalicc.net, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The license it describes belongs to its publisher.

Use this license

Everything below is generated from this record. Replace the example address with the address of your own work.

JSON sidecar

{
  "license-uri": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/CC-PDDC",
  "license-title": "Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification",
  "spdx-id": "CC-PDDC",
  "asset": null,
  "generated-by": "DALICC"
}

RDF, Turtle

@prefix cc: <http://creativecommons.org/ns#> .

<https://example.org/my-work>
    cc:license <https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/CC-PDDC> .

RDF, JSON-LD

{
  "@context": {
    "cc": "http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
  },
  "@id": "https://example.org/my-work",
  "cc:license": {
    "@id": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/CC-PDDC"
  }
}

This license carries no attribution duty, so no credit line is offered here.

Badge

Markdown

[![License: Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification](https://dalicc.net/license-library/CC-PDDC/badge.svg)](https://dalicc.net/license-library/CC-PDDC)

HTML

<a href="https://dalicc.net/license-library/CC-PDDC"><img src="https://dalicc.net/license-library/CC-PDDC/badge.svg" alt="License: Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication and Certification"></a>

Review

Written from the license text by: Giray Havur
Written on: 2026-09-22
Second review: not yet done
Record changed since this review: yes (version 2, 2026-09-24)
Findings: 11 recorded, 8 applied to the record, 1 proposed

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.

11 findings

info Rubric 1 spdx:licenseId applied

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.
info Rubric 2 odrl:target applied

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.
major Rubric 3 odrl:permission applied

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.
minor Rubric 4 odrl:prohibition applied

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.
major Rubric 4 odrl:prohibition proposed

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.
major Rubric 5 odrl:duty applied

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.
minor Rubric 6 dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer applied

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.
info Rubric 7 cc:jurisdiction applied

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.
gap Rubric 8 dalicc:additionalClauses none

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.
info Rubric 9 record none

The consistency check of app.services.composer against the axioms of licensedata/dependencygraph/dg_default.ttl returned no conflicts.
info Rubric 10 record applied

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.

Report an issue The review record as JSON The review checks the model against the license text. It is not legal advice.

History

This license model has 2 versions. Version 2 is the one served today; every earlier version keeps its own address, so a conclusion drawn from one of them can still be checked against it.

Version 2 current2026-09-24 Giray Havur

The changes since version 1 recorded which sentence of the text each statement rests on and named the license the record itself is published under.

View version 2 JSON-LD Turtle RDF/XML
2 changes
- changed permission odrl:reproduce
  
  was permission odrl:reproduce
  
  Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, 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."
- added dct:license <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>
  
  Manual edit Every record is published under CC BY 4.0. cc:license names the record DALICC keeps of that licence; dct:license now names it by the address Creative Commons publishes it at, so that a consumer matching the canonical IRI finds it.
Version 1

Created from the license text on 2026-09-22 (Creative Commons public domain dedication).

View version 1 JSON-LD Turtle RDF/XML

Every change names the reason behind it: a finding of the content review, one of its library-wide decisions, the metadata that review wrote onto every record, or a hand edit. None of it is legal advice.

Nothing on this page is legal advice. What a license means is decided by its text; ask a legal advisor before you rely on it.