Public domain

“ Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a public domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The public domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. ”

“ We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. "The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use."12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. ”

“ How does a book enter the public domain?
A book, or other copyrightable work, enters the public domain when its copyright lapses or when the copyright owner releases it to the public domain.
U.S. Government documents can never be copyrighted in the first place; they are "born" into the public domain. ”

“ In today's copyright law, the facts and ideas in an author's work proceed immediately into the public domain. In other work, I have argued that by confining the property right tightly to the "original expression" stemming from the unique personality of an individual author the law seems to accomplish a number of things simultaneously. ”

“ In fact, in many cases, the reality is even worse: there appears to be a complete ignorance about the value of the public domain. Property's opposite, its outside, is getting short shrift. 47
To paraphrase a song from my youth, "how did we get here?" Where should we turn to understand the role of intellectual property in the era of the Internet and the decoding of the human genome? We could turn to the cutting edge of technology or to economics or information theory. ”

“ Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment."22 The Washington Post, though more inclined to agree that retrospective extension might be constitutional, declared the copyright system to be "broken" in that it "effectively and perpetually protects nearly all material that anyone would want to cite or use. ”

“ We know that the majority of works are only valuable for five or ten years. Let us give copyright owners more than double that, say twenty-eight years of exclusive rights. If prior experience is any guide, 85 percent of works will be allowed to enter the public domain after that period. If that isn't generous enough, let us say that the small proportion of owners who still find value in their copyright at the end of twenty-eight years can extend their copyright for another twenty-eight years. Works that are not renewed fall immediately into the public domain. ”

“ But it is an example of a new move in the debate over intellectual property, a new tactic: the attempt to create a privately constructed commons where the public domain created by the state does not give you the freedom that you believe creativity needs in order to thrive. ”

“ Upon expiration of the term of protection of economic rights, the work shall fall into the public domain. Any person can freely use the works in public domain without the authorґ.s remuneration, however, protecting the right of authorship, the right of name and the right of honor and reputation of the author. ”

“ Ten years ago, civil society had little to offer in terms of groups that represented anything other than an industry position on intellectual property, still less ones that took seriously the preservation of the public domain or the idea that intellectual property policy was a matter of balance, rather than simple maximization of rights. ”

“ Lessig and others within the Creative Commons organisation feel that the public domain is something dwindling in today's society, which creates a situation potentially detrimental to culture at large. ”

“ A private domain is built at the expense of a public domain. We would stretch the statement, if it would be stated that the emperor and dignitaries were large real estate owners: in fact, the idea remains that the community had the principal rights. ”

“ Convention to apply to all works not in public domain
The present Convention applies to all works which, at the moment of its coming into force, have not fallen into the public domain of their country of origin because of the expiration of the term of protection. ”

“ The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of their rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. ”

“ UK GLAM Policies on copyright and open access.
This portion of the research asked: How are UK GLAMs interpreting laws and shaping public access to digital media generated around public domain works? The discussion below quotes heavily from public facing policies.
4.1. Introducing inconsistency and inflexibility
Public facing policies can provide insight into internal operations, such as how an organisation views and values its digital collections and interprets various laws and obligations to the public.
Law, itself, is deeply situated in a culture of ‘it depends’. ”

“ In the case of doubt regarding interpretation of the legislative authority, the Office of Legal Affairs will be consulted and its determination will be forwarded to the Publications Board.
7. The general rule for Official Records, United Nations documents and public information material is that these publications will be in the public domain. However, in exceptional circumstances, author departments may apply to the Publications Board to obtain copyright protection for such materials. ”

“ VI REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR. The national domain is the whole area, land and water, lying within the national boundaries known as the United States. The public domain, or public lands-the property of the nation, and subject to legislative control and disposition by Congress alone-is the area known as public lands acquired by treaty, capture, cession by States, conquest or other acquisition, and purchase. ”

“ Any one familiar with the vast tracts of the public domain surveyed and sold, and tracts surveyed and yet unsold, within the period mentioned, can form some idea of the extent of the disturbance and confusion that must inevitably flow from an adherence to any such principle. ”

“ And the meaning of this pattern is absolutely clear to those who pay to produce it. The meaning is: no one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm, that though we had a culture where people could take and build upon what went before, that's over. There is no such thing as the public domain in the minds of those who have produced these 11 extensions these last 40 years because now culture is owned. ”

“ They point us to the dramatic role that openness—whether in network architecture, software, or content—has had in the success of the Internet. What is going on here is actually a remarkable corrective to the simplistic notion of the tragedy of the commons, a corrective to the Internet Threat storyline and to the dynamics of the second enclosure movement. This commons creates and sustains value, and allows firms and individuals to benefit from it, without depleting the value already created. ”

“ On the other hand, if the interest of the community in any function is direct, and indirect for individuals singly or associated together, it is proper for the State and not for individuals to take hold of it.—According to this rule the limits of the public and private domain can be defined, which limits, as they change backward and forward, may be verified according to the changes which take place in interests and preferences, direct or indirect. ”

“ Typical of yours truly, I just discovered the comprehensive gallery of images on Wikisource on the Special pages. Would it be OK if I occasionally transfer some of the images to the Commons? I am referring to the ones which meet the Commons requirements i.e: public domain, 19th & early 20th century as related to my interests.— Ineuw talk 17:10, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
I would think that we would be most grateful if any image that meets the requirements of Commons was transferred there, and its data checked for integrity. Our aim is to only have those that cannot be hosted at Commons. ”

“ No right of eminent domain in respect to copyrights is asserted by the United States, and the provision means only that material, otherwise copyrightable, furnished by a public officer or otherwise to the Government, becoming the property of the Government, is put freely at the service of the people. ”

“ Wikisource:Sheet music 08:14, 16 January 2008 (UTC) Thanks!! But what on earth is the difference between these three? Why is public domain better? Ockham 08:18, 16 January 2008 (UTC) Another new user asked for advice regarding GFDL vs Creative Commons, and I tried to give a decent comparison. See User talk:Skylark1#On licenses. Public domain is considered by some to be better because it releases your work from any copyright restrictions. There are also many reasons why public domain isn't optimal. ”

“ Congress periodically considers legislative proposals that would allow the ownership of facts.5 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives content providers a whole array of legally protected digital fences to enclose their work.6 In some cases it effectively removes the privilege of fair use. Each day brings some new Internet horror story about the excesses of intellectual property. ”

“ More generally, people who may have agreed (even with their signature) to have material on public display may change their mind as they begin to realise what the Internet is and what open access may imply. ”

“ That you don’t have to have a phone which spies on you. That you don’t have to report to Google every call you dial. That you don’t have to see every advertisement. That it is possible, in the ecology of commons, to achieve the goal of acting locally and thinking globally about the commons. That your relationship to the commons is itself, now, a political act with public consequences that should be publicly shared and publicly known about. ”

“ Publish Government Information Online — particularly high-value data and through an open gateway for agency activities. 2. Improve the Quality of Government Information 3. Create and Institutionalize a Culture of Open Government 4. Create an Enabling Policy Framework for Open Government We are working through the mechanisms at the National Archives to embrace these goals and principles, and we will release a first draft of our plan on April 7. At the heart of the plan is a flagship initiative to develop web and data services that are worthy of the American people. ”

“ In general, then, the matters of which the publication should be repressed may be described as those which concern the private life, habits, acts, and relations of an individual, and have no legitimate connection with his fitness for a public office which he seeks or for which he is suggested, or for any public or quasi public position which he seeks or for which he is suggested, and have no legitimate relation to or bearing upon any act done by him in a public or quasi public capacity. ”

“ Using Commons would provide an immediate opportunity to release cultural heritage for the public while still allowing the long-term development of different digital archives for institutional and preservational purposes.3 Operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, Commons is a community managed, open and free multilanguage platform. It provides access to millions of people by sharing images under open licences. Wikipedias of all languages are using Commons to illustrate their articles, and the photos appear on news sites, blogs, and research articles all over the world. ”

“ B. Open Access to Primary Source Materials As important as the movement to open access to legal (and other) scholarship is, the public may derive still greater benefit from making primary legal source materials—statutes, regulations, case law, and the like—more broadly accessible. [26] Positive law directly regulates individual behavior, and partly for that reason, individual due process interests in access to the law have long been recognized. [27] Principles of democratic legitimacy also favor open access by citizens to information necessary to police the functioning of government. ”

“ I think the medium [the Internet] is going to continue being essential, and then give birth to original, precise, specific services, bywhich time we will have found an economic model of viability. For information cybermedias like the Chroniques de Cybérie as well as for info-services, community and on-line public services, electronic commerce, distance learning, the post-modern policy which is going to change the elected representatives/principals, in fact, everything is coming around. ”

“ Now given that Wikipedia is a public enterprise open to the entire public for collaboration and contribution, you may be wondering how wikis or the Wikimedia model may be useful to government. First of all, I want to note generally that there are other ways in which a wiki can be set up usefully, including set ups that do not involve opening the wiki to the general public. You can control access, and a wiki might be useful to an agency that wants to facilitate information sharing up and down the hierarchy for increased vertical sharing. ”