A rock star (who shall remain unnamed) told me he wanted to give away his latest work to the public domain. I helped him get the work in open non-proprietary formats.

I told him in principle that Creative Commons licensing would be what he is after, but that it has problems. Creative Commons license text contains links to the creative commons website which then hooks in more licensing terms. There is nothing wrong with the terms but the CC website is jailed in Cloudflare’s walled garden and the URL is part of the licensing text.

I told the artist he would be liberating his work but at the same time he would be technically subjecting users to a bullying US tech giant who makes content arbitrarily exclusive by shutting out some demographics of people and also abusing the privacy of those who are privileged to obtain access to the license text.

I suggested modifying the CC license to remove the CC URL and exclude Cloudflare from being a license gatekeeper, noting of course the big pitfall: if the work is not exactly CC, then it cannot use the CC name, thus the work cannot simply be treated as such by platforms which depend on the easy cookie-cutter CC license. The work cannot simply be copied to a platform that is designed for CC works.

But by rebelling he could perhaps make a splash by casting a spotlight on suppression by Cloudflare. The burden/encumberance of his unique license would trigger a discussion that might get Creative Commons to gain some wisdom and nix the hypocrisy of Cloudflare-dependent licensing.

The artist is a rebel at heart and so he agreed. But I did not act fast. Then he died unexpectedly. All of our discussions were verbal, so his will in this regard is undocumented and thus non-existent from a legal standpoint. I think this means the naturally copyrighted work in question is forever all rights reserved and cannot be liberated, correct?

Or is it a matter of tracking down who in his will inherits the rights to the works in his estate and seeing if they concur with a liberated release?