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92-539: The public domain ( PD ) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived , or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive rights, anyone can legally use or reference those works without permission. As examples, the works of William Shakespeare , Ludwig van Beethoven , Miguel de Cervantes , Zoroaster , Lao Zi , Confucius , Aristotle , L. Frank Baum , Leonardo da Vinci and Georges Méliès are in

184-458: A "Public Domain Day" was initially informal; the earliest known mention was in 2004 by Wallace McLean (a Canadian public domain activist), with support for the idea echoed by Lawrence Lessig . As of 1 January 2010, there is as Public Domain Day website lists the authors whose works are entering the public domain. There are activities in countries around the world by various organizations all under

276-644: A "convincing case that fair use may not be as doctrinally incoherent as many have suggested". In 2004, Google initiated the Print Library Project , in which the company partnered with university libraries to scan their entire book collections. Books digitized in the project were searchable in the Google Books engine, where users could view certain information about the books, and "snippets" of text. The Author's Guild and several individual authors filed suit , alleging copyright infringement. In 2008, Google and

368-424: A "unquestionable right" to repair any product they purchased, but that in recent years such repair has become more difficult due to the increasing complexity of consumer devices and their reliance on copyrighted software. In addition to copyright-supported arguments, she has supported them on environmental grounds: "Makers of software-enabled devices may . . . try to persuade consumers to trade in their old devices for

460-512: A certain type of information was within the public domain is not merely a matter of legal doctrine but also whether, as a matter of practice and tradition, that information is actually accessible to the public. Samuelson's broader view of the public domain represented a conceptual shift which inspired other work on entitlements and cultural appropriation. Samuelson has written extensively regarding various efforts to expand copyright protections to novel areas, or to use related areas of law to expand

552-514: A copyright has expired depends on an examination of the copyright in its source country. In most countries that are signatories to the Berne Convention , copyright term is based on the life of the author, and extends to 50 or 70 years beyond the death of the author. (See List of copyright terms of countries .) In the United States, determining whether a work has entered the public domain or

644-623: A member of the faculty since 1996. She holds a joint appointment at the UC Berkeley School of Information . She is a co-founder of Authors Alliance and a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology . A 1971 graduate of the University of Hawaiʻi and a 1976 graduate of Yale Law School , Samuelson practiced law as a litigation associate with Willkie Farr & Gallagher before becoming an academic. From 1981 through 1996 she

736-654: A new sui generis type of legal protection for software. In 1999, the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws proposed an amendment to the Uniform Commercial Code ("Article 2B," later renamed the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act , or "UCITA") that would lay out a standard set of rules to govern transactions in information products and services. Samuelson identified several fundamental issues with

828-450: A person draws on because they view the source as creative or inspirational; the degree to which this is reflected may be used in determinations of the derivativeness of the created work . Alternatively, the creator may draw on imagination , and their references may be clouded even to them, for the nature of imagination is as yet not fully understood philosophically, and the level of necessary self-examination of an artist's internal processing

920-540: A tool to advance society's knowledge, Samuelson has argued for limits on copyright protection that promote innovation by preserving the ability to create products compatible with other products. In 2010, Oracle sued Google claiming that Google had infringed its copyright by reimplementing parts of the Java API in the Android platform. Samuelson (sometimes with other scholars, including Clark Asay) filed several amicus briefs as

1012-684: A vote in Congress. US copyright law allows plaintiffs to elect to receive statutory damages rather than actual damages in any amount between $ 750 and $ 150,000. The court may award any amount within that range that it "considers just". In a series of articles, Samuelson and co-authors argued that because courts have failed to construct a coherent doctrine for their award, "[a]wards of statutory damages are frequently arbitrary, inconsistent, unprincipled, and sometimes grossly excessive," and that some awards may even be unconstitutional. Samuelson and her co-authors argued that compensation and modest deterrence were

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1104-457: A work may be subject to rights in one country and be in the public domain in another. Some rights depend on registrations on a country-by-country basis, and the absence of registration in a particular country, if required, gives rise to public-domain status for a work in that country. The term public domain may also be interchangeably used with other imprecise or undefined terms such as the public sphere or commons , including concepts such as

1196-469: A work, as well as other forms of transformation or adaptation. Copyrighted works may not be used for derivative works without permission from the copyright owner, while public domain works can be freely used for derivative works without permission. Artworks that are public domain may also be reproduced photographically or artistically or used as the basis of new, interpretive works. Works derived from public domain works can be copyrighted. Once works enter into

1288-492: Is a challenge for even those most self-aware of their minds and mental processes. The term is frequently used in the context of copyright . For the purpose of section 221(2)(c) of the Income Tax (Trading and Other Income) Act 2005 , the expression "creative works" means: (a) literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works, or (b) designs, created by the taxpayer personally or, if the qualifying trade, profession or vocation

1380-605: Is a combination of the copyright symbol , which acts as copyright notice , with the international 'no' symbol . The Europeana databases use it, and for instance on the Wikimedia Commons in February 2016 2.9 million works (~10% of all works) are listed with the mark. The underlying idea that is expressed or manifested in the creation of a work generally cannot be the subject of copyright law (see idea–expression divide ). Mathematical formulae will therefore generally form part of

1472-504: Is a film that was never under copyright, was released to public domain by its author, or whose copyright has expired. All films in the United States before January 1st, 1929 have been entered in the public domain. Pamela Samuelson has identified eight "values" that can arise from information and works in the public domain. Possible values include: Derivative works include translations , musical arrangements , and dramatizations of

1564-733: Is a past Fellow of the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 2005, she was awarded the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Social Impact, and in 2010 received the IP3 award from Public Knowledge . Samuelson has published over 300 articles for law, technical, and general audiences, focused mainly on copyright law and preserving balance in copyright law amidst innovation and technological change. Although her work

1656-611: Is better known as aspirin in the United States—a generic term. In Canada, however, Aspirin , with an uppercase A, is still a trademark of the German company Bayer , while aspirin, with a lowercase "a", is not. Bayer lost the trademark in the United States, the UK and France after World War I, as part of the Treaty of Versailles . So many copycat products entered the marketplace during the war that it

1748-485: Is carried on in partnership, by one or more of the partners personally. This law -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Pamela Samuelson Pamela Samuelson (born August 4, 1948) is an American legal scholar, activist, and philanthropist. She is the Richard M. Sherman '74 Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law , where she has been

1840-486: Is in the public domain due to an unrenewed copyright. Courts in different jurisdictions have come to different conclusions as to whether the reproduction of a public domain work gains its own rights protection, or whether it to is in the public domain. In a German 2016 case, the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen , an art museum, sued Wikimedia Commons over photographs uploaded to the database depicting pieces of art in

1932-470: Is not possible to waive those rights, but only the rights related to the exploitation of the work. A solution to this issue (as found in the Creative Commons Zero dedication) is to interpret the license by setting "three different layers of action. First, the right holder waives any copyright and related rights that can be waived in accordance with the applicable law. Secondly, if there are rights that

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2024-503: Is only registered in reference to food products (a trademark claim is made within a particular field). Such defences have failed in the United Kingdom. Public Domain Day is an observance of when copyrighted works expire and works enter into the public domain. This legal transition of copyright works into the public domain usually happens every year on 1 January based on the individual copyright laws of each country . The observance of

2116-501: Is required to grant permission (" Permission culture "). There are multiple licenses which aim to release works into the public domain. In 2000 the WTFPL was released as a public domain like software license . Creative Commons (created in 2002 by Lawrence Lessig , Hal Abelson , and Eric Eldred ) has introduced several public-domain-like licenses, called Creative Commons licenses . These give authors of works (that would qualify for copyright)

2208-411: Is still under copyright depends upon what the law or regulation was at creation, and whether new regulations have grandfathered in certain older works. Because copyright terms shifted over the course of the 20th century from a fixed-term based on first publication, with a possible renewal term , to a term extending to 50, then 70, years after the death of the author. The claim that "pre-1929 works are in

2300-671: Is the Zero Clause BSD license , released in 2006 and aimed at software. In October 2014, the Open Knowledge Foundation recommends the Creative Commons CC0 license to dedicate content to the public domain, and the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL) for data. In most countries, the term of rights for patents is 20 years, after which the invention becomes part of

2392-412: Is typically directed at U.S. law, it also includes comparative study of U.S. and European approaches to intellectual property. Samuelson has written about two distinct problems that generative AI poses for copyright law. First: when a computer program generates a work, who owns the copyright to that work? In 1985, Samuelson argued that copyright for works created by computer programs should be allocated to

2484-418: The public sphere or commons , including concepts such as the "commons of the mind", the "intellectual commons", and the "information commons". A public-domain book is a book with no copyright, a book that was created without a license, or a book where its copyrights expired or have been forfeited. In most countries the term of protection of copyright expires on the first day of January, 70 years after

2576-565: The European Parliament and the World Intellectual Property Organization —would have created a new sui generis form of intellectual property protection for database contents. As Samuelson and J.H. Reichman explained, "[t]hese initiatives aim to rescue database producers from the threat of market-destructive appropriations by free-riding competitors who contributed nothing to the costs of collecting or distributing

2668-517: The German Copyright Act , stating that since the photographer needed to make practical decisions about the photograph that it was protected material. In contrast, in the 1999 US case Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. , the court ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack originality . In some countries, certain works may never fully lapse into

2760-489: The Yale Law Journal , Samuelson and Suzanne Schotchmer considered the economic wisdom of legal restrictions on reverse engineering across multiple industries and argued that, as one scholar later summarized, "the legal rules for reverse engineering should depend on copying costs". The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering has been described as the "definitive treatment" of the subject. Judge Frank Easterbrook cited

2852-498: The "commons of the mind", the "intellectual commons", and the "information commons". Although the term domain did not come into use until the mid-18th century, the concept can be traced back to the ancient Roman law , "as a preset system included in the property right system". The Romans had a large proprietary rights system where they defined "many things that cannot be privately owned" as res nullius , res communes , res publicae and res universitatis . The term res nullius

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2944-426: The "personality" of the person drawing them, are not subject to copyright protection. This is separate from the patent rights just mentioned. A trademark registration may remain in force indefinitely, or expire without specific regard to its age. For a trademark registration to remain valid, the owner must continue to use it. In some circumstances, such as disuse, failure to assert trademark rights, or common usage by

3036-597: The DMCA to preserve the legality of bypassing DRM tools for legitimate fair use purposes such as research, but that early court rulings interpreting the DMCA perverted this intent— "adopt[ing] the copyright industry's preferred interpretation of the DMCA as virtually unlimited in its protection of DRM." In 1996, a bill called the Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act was introduced in Congress. The proposal—and others like it introduced at similar times in

3128-498: The Guild announced a settlement agreement , whereby Google could continue to operate Google Book Search, but would have to pay copyright holders for use. Importantly, the settlement would apply to all books. In a letter to the court, Samuelson argued that the settlement was not in the best interests of academic (as opposed to commercial) authors. She observed that "academic authors would be inclined to think that scanning books to index them

3220-572: The UK). In countries where they cannot be waived they will remain into full effect in accordance to the applicable law (think of France, Spain or Italy where moral rights cannot be waived)." The same occurs in Switzerland. The Unlicense , published around 2010, has a focus on an anti-copyright message. The Unlicense offers a public domain waiver text with a fallback public domain-like license inspired by permissive licenses but without attribution. Another option

3312-478: The US, foreign-sourced works and US-sourced works are now treated differently, with foreign-sourced works remaining under copyright regardless of compliance with formalities, while domestically sourced works may be in the public domain if they failed to comply with then-existing formalities requirements—a situation described as odd by some scholars, and unfair by some US-based rightsholders. Works of various governments around

3404-549: The US, works could be easily given into the public domain by just releasing it without an explicit copyright notice . With the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 (and the earlier Copyright Act of 1976 , which went into effect in 1978), all works were by default copyright protected and needed to be actively given into public domain by a waiver statement/ anti-copyright can call notice . Not all legal systems have processes for reliably donating works to

3496-463: The ability to decide which protections they would like to place on their material. As copyright is the default license for new material, Creative Commons licenses offer authors a variety of options to designate their work under whichever license they wish, as long as this does not violate standing copyright law. For example, a CC BY license allows for re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon material, while also agreeing to provide attribution to

3588-479: The advent of large language models such as ChatGPT has sparked lawsuits by copyright holders over the use of their works as "training" material for the programs. Samuelson has argued that such training may well constitute fair use, and warned that allowing copyright holders to restrict use of their works as training materials would "affect everyone who deploys generative AI, integrates it into their products, and uses it for scientific research." Fair use permits

3680-504: The article in his opinion in the trade secret theft case U.S. v Lange . Samuelson has noted similarities between trade secret law and information privacy law, and advocated for adapting licensing rules from trade secret law to the problem of protecting personal information in cyberspace. She has argued that it would be a mistake to grant intellectual property rights to personal data because society does not want to encourage people to sell these data, but rather to safeguard confidentiality of

3772-589: The author in any of these cases. In 2009 the Creative Commons released the CC0 , which was created for compatibility with law domains which have no concept of dedicating into public domain . This is achieved by a public domain waiver statement and a fallback all-permissive license, in case the waiver is not possible. Unlike in the US, where author's moral rights are generally not specifically regulated, in some countries where moral rights are protected separately in law it

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3864-487: The banner Public Domain Day, this can help people around the world celebrate works written a while ago. Creative work At its base, creative work involves two main steps – having an idea , and then turning that idea into a substantive form or process. Typically, the creative process results in work that has some aesthetic value , identified as a creative expression . Naturally, this expression generally invokes external stimuli (e.g., influences and experiences) which

3956-474: The case wound through the courts, arguing both that court holdings were incorrect in holding that copyright (as opposed to patent) protection was available to Oracle for its Java API, and that they were at odds with fair use doctrine. In 2021 the Supreme Court held , on the basis of fair use, that Google had not infringed Oracle's copyright. While approving of the ruling, Samuelson and Mark Lemley wrote that

4048-662: The construction of the idea of "public domain" sprouted from the concepts of res communes , res publicae , and res universitatis in early Roman law. When the first early copyright law was originally established in Britain with the Statute of Anne in 1710, public domain did not appear. However, similar concepts were developed by British and French jurists in the 18th century. Instead of "public domain", they used terms such as publici juris or propriété publique to describe works that were not covered by copyright law. The phrase "fall in

4140-472: The court's holding "sidestepped" the more fundamental issue of whether software interfaces such as APIs can be copyrighted at all. They argued that interfaces are not copyrightable, and wrote that "defendants in future software copyright cases should not shy away from challenging the copyrightability of program interfaces". Samuelson has advocated for passage of Right to Repair legislation in several states. She has argued that traditionally consumers have had

4232-470: The data. In 2007, Samuelson convened the Copyright Principles Project to "explore whether it was possible to reach some consensus about how current copyright law could be improved and how the law's current problems could be mitigated," particularly "in light of dramatic technological advances". The group produced 25 recommendations, including: reinvigorating copyright registration; expanding

4324-404: The date and location of publishing, unless explicitly released beforehand. The Musopen project records music in the public domain for the purposes of making the music available to the general public in a high-quality audio format. Online musical archives preserve collections of classical music recorded by Musopen and offer them for download/distribution as a public service. A public-domain film

4416-464: The death of the latest living author. The longest copyright term is in Mexico, which has life plus 100 years for all deaths since July 1928. A notable exception is the United States, where every book and tale published before 1929 is in the public domain; US copyrights last for 95 years for books originally published between 1929 and 1978 if the copyright was properly registered and maintained. For example:

4508-450: The fair use case law and grouping opinions into what she termed "policy-relevant clusters" according to which of the goals of fair use the decision implicates: 1) freedom of speech and of expression; 2) the ongoing progress of authorship 3) learning; 4) access to information; 5) truth telling or truth seeking; 6) competition; 7) technological innovation; and 8) privacy and autonomy interests. Samuelson's framework has been described as making

4600-500: The former of which refers to melody, notation or lyrics created by a composer or lyricist, including sheet music, and the latter referring to a recording performed by an artist, including a CD, LP, or digital sound file. Musical compositions fall under the same general rules as other works, and anything published before 1925 is considered public domain. Sound recordings, on the other hand, are subject to different rules and are not eligible for public domain status until 2021–2067, depending on

4692-488: The goals that motivate a given part of copyright law and using that understanding to create maps and models of copyright's complex doctrinal landscape. Samuelson's 2003 article Mapping the Digital Public Domain: Threats and Opportunities conceptualized the public domain as a vast landscape populated with information ranging from discarded grocery lists to Mozart symphonies. Samuelson argued that whether

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4784-551: The implications of Article 2B, which several scholars have credited with contributing to the eventual abandonment of the proposed amendments. Software makers and other manufacturers embed digital rights management ("DRM") technology in their products to limit user behaviors —such as copying— which might infringe copyright. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 created rules prohibiting certain types of circumvention of these DRM technologies (so-called anti-circumvention laws). Samuelson argued that Congress intended for

4876-527: The injunction. Samuelson and Krzysztof Bebenek analyzed eBay's impact on copyright cases and argued that the case set a standard "far more in line with traditional principles of equity which place the burden of proof of irreparable injury squarely on the shoulder of plaintiffs who seek the extraordinary remedy of preliminary injunctive relief". In 2022, Samuelson reassessed the caselaw, and reported that injunctions had become less frequent. Consistent with her view that copyright protection should be understood as

4968-659: The interests of all authors. To enable the promulgation of broader perspectives on copyright policy issues, in 2014, Samuelson co-founded Authors Alliance , a non-profit that "advocates for the interests of authors who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly". Authors Alliance has actively participated in comments to the Copyright Office on its policy initiatives, filed amicus briefs in cases addressing copyright and other information policy issues, and in policy debates at conferences and other events. Much of Samuelson's scholarship has focused on identifying

5060-551: The invention without the inventor's consent." In 1984, Samuelson's article CONTU Revisited: The Case against Copyright Protection for Computer Programs in Machine-Readable Form was an early argument that software's utilitarian nature made it inappropriate for copyright protection. In 1994 Samuelson (with Randall Davis, Mitch Kapor , and J.H. Reichman) drew on software's unique characteristics to explain why neither copyright or patent protection were appropriate, and proposed

5152-535: The latest gadgets rather than engage in repairs. Many consumers are likely to find these deals attractive. But as we come to greater realization of the harmful environmental impacts of abandoning our old devices, perhaps repairs will come to be viewed as a better option." Software is expensive to develop but easy to copy. Samuelson has written that this creates challenges in the context of reverse engineering policy, because competition from cheaply produced clones "destroy incentives to invest in software innovation". In

5244-415: The launching point for transformative retellings such as Tom Stoppard 's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Troma Entertainment 's Tromeo and Juliet . Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. is a derivative of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa , one of thousands of derivative works based on the public domain painting. The 2018 film A Star is Born is a remake of the 1937 film of the same name , which

5336-403: The law, including: (1) that the law would affect industries with wildly divergent interests; (2) that the law relied on "market assumptions [that] necessarily rest on risky predictions about the future of information age commerce;" and (3) that the new law would create conflicts between state contract law and federal intellectual property law. Samuelson and others organized a conference to consider

5428-475: The museum. The museum claimed that the photos were taken by their staff, and that photography within the museum by visitors was prohibited. Therefore, photos taken by the museum, even of material that itself had fallen into the public domain, were protected by copyright law and would need to be removed from the Wikimedia image repository. The court ruled that the photographs taken by the museum would be protected under

5520-614: The ocean of the public domain." Copyright law differs by country, and the American legal scholar Pamela Samuelson has described the public domain as being "different sizes at different times in different countries". Definitions of the boundaries of the public domain in relation to copyright, or intellectual property more generally, regard the public domain as a negative space; that is, it consists of works that are no longer in copyright term or were never protected by copyright law. According to James Boyle this definition underlines common usage of

5612-429: The position of chief economist. Samuelson has authored, co-authored, or joined amicus briefs in many cases, including: Samuelson has appeared before or submitted testimony or comments to several government bodies, including: Samuelson has been honored by many organizations over the course of her career, including: Samuelson and her spouse, Robert Glushko , have a family foundation through which they have engaged in

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5704-572: The primary reasons statutory damages were placed in the Copyright Act of 1909, and linked excessive penalties to a recent and (in their view) misplaced change in emphasis to making examples of infringers. They advocated for changes in jurisprudence or legislation to restore statutory damages to their proper place in copyright law. When a court finds a violation of the law in a civil case, it may award money damages or issue an injunction —an order to do something or refrain from doing it. For many years it

5796-507: The public domain (see waiver ); examples include reference implementations of cryptographic algorithms, and the image-processing software ImageJ (created by the National Institutes of Health ). The term public domain is not normally applied to situations where the creator of a work retains residual rights, in which case use of the work is referred to as "under license" or "with permission". As rights vary by country and jurisdiction,

5888-417: The public domain either by virtue of their having been created before copyright existed, or by their copyright term having expired. Some works are not covered by a country's copyright laws, and are therefore in the public domain; for example, in the United States, items excluded from copyright include the formulae of Newtonian physics and cooking recipes. Other works are actively dedicated by their authors to

5980-738: The public domain should be: "it should be a place of sanctuary for individual creative expression, a sanctuary conferring affirmative protection against the forces of private appropriation that threatened such expression". Patterson and Lindberg described the public domain not as a "territory", but rather as a concept: "[T]here are certain materials – the air we breathe, sunlight, rain, space, life, creations, thoughts, feelings, ideas, words, numbers – not subject to private ownership. The materials that compose our cultural heritage must be free for all living to use no less than matter necessary for biological survival." The term public domain may also be interchangeably used with other imprecise or undefined terms such as

6072-600: The public domain" can be traced to mid-19th-century France to describe the end of copyright term . The French poet Alfred de Vigny equated the expiration of copyright with a work falling "into the sink hole of public domain" and if the public domain receives any attention from intellectual property lawyers it is still treated as little more than that which is left when intellectual property rights, such as copyright , patents , and trademarks , expire or are abandoned. In this historical context Paul Torremans describes copyright as a, "little coral reef of private right jutting up from

6164-535: The public domain" is correct only for published works; unpublished works are under federal copyright for at least the life of the author plus 70 years. Legal traditions differ on whether a work in the public domain can have its copyright restored. In the European Union, the Copyright Duration Directive was applied retroactively, restoring and extending the terms of copyright on material previously in

6256-432: The public domain, derivative works such as adaptations in book and film may increase noticeably, as happened with Frances Hodgson Burnett 's novel The Secret Garden , which became public domain in the US in 1977 and most of the rest of the world in 1995. By 1999, the plays of Shakespeare, all public domain, had been used in more than 420 feature-length films. In addition to straightforward adaptation, they have been used as

6348-414: The public domain, e.g. civil law of continental Europe . This may even "effectively prohibit any attempt by copyright owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights ". An alternative is for copyright holders to issue a license which irrevocably grants as many rights as possible to the general public. Real public domain makes licenses unnecessary, as no owner/author

6440-462: The public domain, to the extent that their expression in the form of software is not covered by copyright. Works created before the existence of copyright and patent laws also form part of the public domain. For example, the Bible and the inventions of Archimedes are in the public domain. However, translations or new formulations of these works may be copyrighted in themselves. Determination of whether

6532-872: The public domain. In the United Kingdom , for example, there is a perpetual crown copyright for the Authorized King James Version of the Bible . While the copyright has expired for the Peter Pan works by J. M. Barrie (the play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up and the novel Peter and Wendy ) in the United Kingdom, it was granted a special exception under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (Schedule 6) that requires royalties to be paid for commercial performances, publications and broadcasts of

6624-404: The public domain. In the United States, the contents of patents are considered valid and enforceable for 20 years from the date of filing within the United States or 20 years from the earliest date of filing if under 35 USC 120, 121, or 365(c). However, the text and any illustration within a patent, provided the illustrations are essentially line drawings and do not in any substantive way reflect

6716-529: The public domain. Term extensions by the US and Australia generally have not removed works from the public domain, but rather delayed the addition of works to it. However, the United States moved away from that tradition with the Uruguay Round Agreements Act , which removed from the public domain many foreign-sourced works that had previously not been in copyright in the US for failure to comply with US-based formalities requirements . Consequently, in

6808-400: The public without regard for its intended use, it could become generic , and therefore part of the public domain. Because trademarks are registered with governments, some countries or trademark registries may recognize a mark, while others may have determined that it is generic and not allowable as a trademark in that registry. For example, the drug acetylsalicylic acid (2-acetoxybenzoic acid)

6900-664: The relevant data were introduced." Samuelson and Reichman agreed that existing laws "often fail to afford those who produce today's most commercially valuable information goods enough lead time to recoup their investments." However, they argued that the specific proposals advanced would "jeopardize basic scientific research, eliminate competition in the markets for value-added products and services, and convert existing barriers to entry into insuperable legal barriers to entry". The Copyright Office cited Samuelson's work in their Report on Legal Protection for Databases . The Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act never received

6992-407: The remedies available to copyright holders. In the U.S., a copyright protects a creator's "exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and perform or display [a] work, and prevents other people from copying or exploiting the creation without the copyright holder's permission." Patents , by contrast, safeguard utilitarian "inventions and processes from other parties copying, making, using, or selling

7084-518: The right holder cannot waive under applicable law, they are licensed in a way that mirrors as closely as possible the legal effect of a waiver. And finally, if there are any rights that the right holders cannot waive or license, they affirm that they will not exercise them and they will not assert any claim with respect to the use of the work, once again within the limits of applicable law. (...) In countries where moral rights exist but where they can be waived or not asserted, they are waived if asserted (e.g.

7176-562: The role of the Copyright Office and modernizing its functions; refining the exclusive rights granted to authors; and creating safe harbor provisions to protect against some infringement claims. Samuelson testified to Congress regarding these proposals, and the Copyright Office has adopted at least two of the group's recommendations: creating a small claims court for copyright matters (the Copyright Claims Board), and creating

7268-488: The state or to an authors' association. The user does not have to seek permission to copy, present or perform the work, but does have to pay the fee. Typically the royalties are directed to support of living artists. In 2010, The Creative Commons proposed the Public Domain Mark (PDM) as symbol to indicate that a work is free of known copyright restrictions and therefore in the public domain. The public domain mark

7360-401: The story of Peter Pan within the UK, as long as Great Ormond Street Hospital (to whom Barrie gave the copyright) continues to exist. In a paying public domain regime, works that have entered the public domain after their copyright has expired, or traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions that have never been subject to copyright, are still subject to royalties payable to

7452-460: The term public domain and equates the public domain to public property and works in copyright to private property . However, the usage of the term public domain can be more granular, including for example uses of works in copyright permitted by copyright exceptions . Such a definition regards work in copyright as private property subject to fair use rights and limitation on ownership. A conceptual definition comes from Lange, who focused on what

7544-411: The unlicensed use of original expression from copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. However, the flexibility of the doctrine led Judge Pierre Leval to describe it as "mysterious" and lament the perception that it is a "disorderly basket of exceptions". Courts formally assess four factors in determining whether a given use is fair. in 2009, Samuelson augmented that analysis by canvassing

7636-441: The user of the program, rather than to the computer, the programmer, or some combination of those parties. She also forecast that "[a]s 'artificial intelligence' (AI) programs become increasingly sophisticated in their role as the 'assistants' of humans in the [creation] of a wide range of products . . . the question of who will own what rights in the 'output' of such programs may well become a hotly contested issue." More recently,

7728-537: The works of Jane Austen , Lewis Carroll , Machado de Assis , Olavo Bilac and Edgar Allan Poe are in the public domain worldwide as they all died over 100 years ago. Project Gutenberg , the Internet Archive and Wikisource make tens of thousands of public domain books available online as ebooks . People have been creating music for millennia. The first musical notation system, the Music of Mesopotamia system,

7820-409: The world may be excluded from copyright law and may therefore be considered to be in the public domain in their respective countries. They may also be in the public domain in other countries as well. The legal scholar Melville Nimmer has written that "it is axiomatic that material in the public domain is not protected by copyright, even when incorporated into a copyrighted work". Before 1 March 1989, in

7912-467: Was a member of the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law , from which she visited at Columbia , Cornell , and Emory Law Schools. Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1996, she has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School , NYU School of Law and Fordham University School of Law . Since 2002, she has held an honorary professorship at the University of Amsterdam . Samuelson

8004-459: Was created 4,000 years ago. Guido of Arezzo introduced Latin musical notation in the 10th century. This laid the foundation for the preservation of global music in the public domain, a distinction formalized alongside copyright systems in the 17th century. Musicians copyrighted their publications of musical notation as literary writings, but performing copyrighted pieces and creating derivative works were not restricted by early copyright laws. Copying

8096-455: Was deemed generic just three years later. Informal uses of trademarks are not covered by trademark protection. For example, Hormel , producer of the canned meat product Spam , does not object to informal use of the word "spam" in reference to unsolicited commercial email. However, it has fought attempts by other companies to register names including the word 'spam' as a trademark in relation to computer products, despite that Hormel's trademark

8188-401: Was defined as things not yet appropriated. The term res communes was defined as "things that could be commonly enjoyed by mankind, such as air, sunlight and ocean." The term res publicae referred to things that were shared by all citizens, and the term res universitatis meant things that were owned by the municipalities of Rome. When looking at it from a historical perspective, one could say

8280-512: Was fair use, not copyright infringement". They would, moreover, "be likely to want their out-of print books to be available on an open access basis rather than through a profit-maximizing scheme such as the GBS settlement proposed." The court eventually rejected the settlement and Google Books was ruled fair use . The court cited Samuelson's letter in holding that the Author's Guild did not adequately represent

8372-443: Was standard practice for courts to issue injunctions when they found copyright infringement had occurred. However, in the 2006 patent case eBay v. MercExchange , the U.S. Supreme Court held that injunctive relief should issue only when plaintiffs can satisfy the same 4-part test used in other injunctive relief situations. Most notably, the eBay test requires the plaintiff to demonstrate that "irreparable harm" would occur without

8464-427: Was widespread, in compliance with the law, but expansions of those laws intended to benefit literary works and responding to commercial music recording technology's reproducibility have led to stricter rules. Relatively recently, a normative view that copying in music is not desirable and lazy has become popular among professional musicians. US copyright laws distinguish between musical compositions and sound recordings,

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