User:Mdaniels5757/JMabel on CC vs PD

Copying this here because I'll likely want to use it in the future.

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This is an effort to lay out the key points about public domain and COM:L free-licenses in terms of what we can accept on Commons. (For much more, follow up the links in the previous sentence.) Some of this will probably be old hat to you, but I can see that you are missing at least some of it.

• While there are some historical exceptions (mostly U.S. before the late 1980s; see the Hirtle chart for details on that), typically a photo or other image is considered to be copyrighted on creation, with the person who creates it as the copyright-holder. In some (but not all) cases where a person creates a "work for hire" as part of their job, the copyright may belong to the employer; copyrights can also sometimes be transferred contractually.
• For any work that is copyrighted, Commons will only host it if it is "free-licensed", including allowing commercial use and derivative works. Only the person who owns the copyright can grant such a license. So, if it's your own work you can grant (for example), a CC-BY-SA license, but you cannot grant such a license on someone else's work. If it's third-party work, the only legitimate way that license can be offered is if it was offered by the copyright-holder. If they did not offer such a license, you cannot simply add it. You can (possibly) get the copyright-holder or their heir to grant such a license (often done via go the COM:VRT process), but if they don't want to do it, then we can't have the image on Commons.
• Works can enter the public domain several ways. A few governments -- very few, but notably including the federal government of the United States -- place work by their employees (but usually not their contractors) immediately into the public domain. More typically, works enter the public domain a particular amount of time after their creation or after the death of their creator. Details vary by country.
• You can't offer a CC license for a work in the public domain any more than you can license use of the Brooklyn Bridge. You don't own it, so you can't grant a license to use it. Rather than a license tag/template as such, it needs a tag/template explaining why it is in the public domain. A typical example is {{PD-US-auto-expired}}, which requires a death date as a parameter. There are also specialized tags like Template:TlPD-US-not renewed, {{PD-old-assumed}} (at least 120 years old, and we can't sort out the authorship or the author's death date), or country-specific tags like {{PD-Italy}} that account for unusual features of the law in particular countries.

The upshot: "CC" tags and "PD" tags are quite distinct from one another, and represent two entirely different bases on which we can host an image.