Public Domain - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

Pervasive use of the term "public domain" in an early cyberspace context must have started with someone (possibly a non-native English speaker?) who had recently been reading about copyright and intellectual property law but hadn't really been paying very close attention.

1. On BBSes, the Public Domain was, quite literally, the domain encompassing all public systems -- BBSes hosting only files they were explicitly allowed to host (freeware and demo and trial versions of shareware and commercial software, BASIC programs from the mainframe days that pre-dated software copyright, materials that had been given freely like eg. user-written video game walkthroughs or NASA-derived stargazing photos, and transcriptions of genuinely public domain texts from prior to 1913). Public Domain (or PD) systems could feel free to advertise themselves, publicly, in periodicals because there was nothing illicit about what was going on in them, and basically... they had nothing to hide from anyone. If an "underground" of cyberspace could be defined as being in contrast or opposition to anything, it was to this Public Domain. In some circles, the realms of the warez underground were described as "NPD" or "Non-Public-Domain".

There were many distinguishing qualities dividing Public Domain BBSes from underground ones: they were more likely to work on a real name basis vs. a nickname one, and to require real and verified information about its users -- some would require users to submit photocopies of their driver's license! Anyone who was interested in sustainably making money on BBSes was very Public Domain, both to maximise their potential customer base and because it's hard to build a sustainable business model out of proceeds of crime, which can be confiscated at any time... so larger, multi-line BBSes tended to be Public Domain systems, and they would often move to become nodes on the [FidoNet] echomail network, which required a lot of following strict rules and regulations. (There's an old joke about how in Germany, everything not permitted is forbidden. That's like a FidoNet node.) (The joke continues: in America, everything not forbidden is permitted. The computer underground is more like the second punchline, suggesting that in France, everything forbidden is permitted.) Public Domain BBSes were more likely to appear on BBS lists shared on other Public Domain BBSes -- they were a self-reinforcing ecosystem. There were certain BBS host softwares that PD bulletin board systems were more likely to run, such as Remote Access, Wildcat! and PCBoard -- definitely where commercial BBS softwares were concerned it was PD SysOps who were more likely to be paying real money to register them, while the hackers who ran underground BBSes were more likely to gravitate to softwares that were more easily crackable and which offered greater flexibility in allowing them to inject as much garish and elite ANSI interface art as possible.

2. Which brings us to the Public Domain ANSI art aesthetic. The most celebrated and fondly-remembered ANSI art is all from the underground, but before RaDMaN cribbed from Noel Gamboa's notes and invented ACiD, people were still drawing ANSI art in the '80s. Typically PD screens were drawn using TheDraw, and were only 25 lines in length. If they featured typography more likely than not they were [TDF] fonts. Areas of ANSI art potential that were widely embraced by Public Domain ANSI artists but rejected by underground ones include [blinking], ANSImation and the embedding of [ANSI music] into screens. The drawings were more likely to be against a backdrop of black emptiness, if areas of colour did abut they typically would feature no outlines keeping them discrete (violating the unspoken [no tocar] principle in effect in the underground), and often non-block ASCII characters (eg. box-drawing characters) would be used extensively to suggest texture or fine detail. Public Domain ANSI art was basically never collected into artpacks except after the fact in a shovelware vein, but would be shared to BBS message bases for the appreciation of fellow connoisseurs on a case by case basis as they were created.

Furthermore, rather than the moody teenager's bedroom of demonic and criminal influences featured in underground ANSI art, PD ANSI was far more likely to celebrate holidays, local sports teams and favorite top-40 bands, adapt cross-stitch designs, and reproduce panels from the comic strips in their local newspaper (Ziggy, Bloom County, Beetle Bailey... that kind of thing) -- culturally the themes of PD ANSI belonged more obviously to the normcore status quo of the offline world. If a PD ANSI artist did decide to draw a superhero, it was far more likely to be Superman than Spawn, but more likely still they would be celebrating Stormin' Norman booting Saddam Hussein in the rear.

Despite all this, some artists somehow managed to distinguish themselves in this basically prehistoric field, and in addition to the aforementioned Mr. Gamboa the cream of the crop was widely considered to be [Ebony Eyes]. Videon wowed many players of the [Trade Wars 2002] BBS door game with his ANSImated illustrations of space stations and alien vessels, and Michael Arnett and MCL (Michael C. Ling) also offered approachable and interesting bodies of work in the medium. There were more PD ANSI artists than we have room to tabulate here, but ... basically, they will not be missed.

• Noel Gamboa would like you all to appreciate that the phrase "Public Domain" in reference to the simple early ANSI art styles (and likely to the aboveground BBS scene) is an exonym -- it's a term that was widely used in the underground about others, but those others never used it to refer to themselves. As far as they knew, their BBS world was the only one there was, and their ANSI art was as good as it got.