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 The Creative Commons project provides licenses designed to facilitate dedications to the public domain. One such license, the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, states the author’s intent to “dedicate[ ] whatever copyright the [author] holds. . . to the public domain,” with the express recognition that this will permit “anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial” freely to “reproduce[ ], distribute[ ], transmit[ ], use[ ], modif[y], buil[d] upon, or otherwise exploit” the work “including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.” Finally, the license contains a number of terms aimed at assuring a permanent, irrevocable dedication:

Dedicator makes this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of the Dedicator’s heirs and successors. Dedicator intends this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in the Work. Dedicator understands that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.

Although the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication has attracted some interest from makers of expressive works, the Dedication may be legally problematic. Nothing in the Copyright Act contemplates a voluntary extinguishment of the rights vested by the statute in the creator of a work, and the courts have been highly reluctant to find copyright abandonment.

Moreover, attempting to cut off the rights of heirs may present a