I don't like it. There might be appropriate circumstances for public domain designations, but I think it seems much more attractive to laypeople than it should. Most people should probably stick to licensing their artistic work with something resembling one of the creative commons licenses.
It's always been possible to designate an image to the public domain on flickr, by pasting a designation into the description, but this gave it a level of overhead that I think discouraged people who hadn't thought about it much to avoid it.
Edit: This is getting downvotes, which I'm not sure I understand, but I'll assume it's because I didn't explain the problems with public domain designations. If there are other reasons, I'd appreciate a comment explaining them.
IANAL, but as I understand, there's some debate over whether works can be committed to the public domain at all. This makes some individuals, and a lot of big companies, hesitant to make use of anything with a public domain designation. Most people who try to commit something to the public domain rather than picking a popular non-restrictive license do so in effort to remove all obstacles to people using it, without realizing that there might be more obstacles with a public domain designation than a CC-BY license.
It's always been possible to designate an image to the public domain on flickr, by pasting a designation into the description, but this gave it a level of overhead that I think discouraged people who hadn't thought about it much to avoid it.
Edit: This is getting downvotes, which I'm not sure I understand, but I'll assume it's because I didn't explain the problems with public domain designations. If there are other reasons, I'd appreciate a comment explaining them.
IANAL, but as I understand, there's some debate over whether works can be committed to the public domain at all. This makes some individuals, and a lot of big companies, hesitant to make use of anything with a public domain designation. Most people who try to commit something to the public domain rather than picking a popular non-restrictive license do so in effort to remove all obstacles to people using it, without realizing that there might be more obstacles with a public domain designation than a CC-BY license.