Hey Here is the info you requested hope that this helps you I broke it
up into sections so just scroll down to a topic of interest and read.
The PUBLIC DOMAIN comprises the body of all creative works and other
knowledge?writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others?in
which no person or organization has any proprietary interest.
(Proprietary interest is typically represented by a copyright or
patent.) Such works and inventions are considered part of the public's
cultural heritage, and anyone can use and build upon them without
restriction (not taking into account laws concerning safety, export,
etc.).
While copyright was designed to give a (financial) incentive to the
creator, works in the public domain just exist as such. The public
have the right to use and reuse works in the public domain without
financial or social burden. When copyright or other protections reach
the end of their life, works are said to revert to the public domain.
Without some kind of grant of monopoly rights?so-called
"intellectual property rights"?all works belong to the public domain.
Thus a balance between individual incentive to create and free access
for the public has to be struck.
ABSENCE OF LEGAL PROTECTION:
Creative works are in the public domain wherever no law exists to
establish proprietary rights, or where the subject matter is
specifically excluded from existing laws. For example, most
mathematical formulas are not subject to copyrights or patents in most
of the world (although their application in the form of computer
programs can be patented). Likewise, works that were created long
before such laws were passed are part of the public domain, such as
the works of William Shakespeare and Ludwig van Beethoven and the
inventions of Archimedes (however, translations of the works of
Archimedes, Shakespeare, etc., may be subject to copyright). Also,
works of the United States Government are excluded from copyright law.
EXPIRATION:
Most copyrights and patents have a finite term; when this expires,
the work or invention falls into the public domain. In most of the
world, patents expire 20 years after they are filed. Trademarks expire
soon after the mark becomes a generic term. Copyrights are more
complex; generally, they expire in all countries except Guatemala,
Mexico, Samoa and Colombia when all of the following conditions are
satisfied:
The work was created and first published before January 1, 1923, or
at least 95 years before January 1 of the current year, whichever is
later.
The last surviving author died at least 70 years before January 1 of
the current year.
No Berne Convention signatory has passed a perpetual copyright on the work.
Neither the United States nor the European Union has passed a
copyright term extension since these conditions were last updated.
(This must be a condition because the exact numbers in the other
conditions depend on the state of the law at any given moment.)
These conditions are based on the intersection of United States and
European Union copyright law, which most other Berne Convention
signatories recognize. Note that copyright term extension under U.S.
tradition does not restore copyright to public domain works (hence the
1923 date), but European tradition does because the EU harmonization
was based on the copyright term in Germany, which had already been
extended to life plus 70. Note further that works created by a United
States government agency fall into public domain at the moment of
creation.
The situation with respect to British government works is a little
more complex, but still relatively easy to understand. British
government works are restricted by either Crown Copyright or
Parliamentary Copyright. Published Crown Copyright works become public
domain at the end of the year 50 years after they were published,
unless the author of the work held copyright and assigned it to the
Crown. In that case, the copyright term is the usual life of author
plus 70 years. Unpublished Crown Copyright documents become public
domain at the end of the year 125 years after they were first created.
However, under the legislation that created this rule, and abolished
the traditional common law perpetual copyright protection of
unpublished works, no unpublished works will become public domain
until 50 years after the legislation came into effect. Since the
legislation became law on 1 August 1989, no unpublished works will
become public domain under this provision until 2039. Parliamentary
Copyright documents become public domain at the end of the year 50
years after they were published. Crown Copyright is waived on some
government works provided that certain conditions are met.
These numbers reflect the most recent extensions of copyright in
the United States and Europe. Canada and Australia have not, as of
2004, passed similar twenty-year extensions. Consequently, their
copyright expiry times are still life of the author plus 50 years. As
a result, characters such as Mickey Mouse, and works ranging from
Peter Pan to the stories of H. P. Lovecraft are public domain in both
places. (The copyright status of Lovecraft's work is debatable, as no
copyright renewals, which were necessary under the laws of that time,
have been found. Also, two competing parties have independently
claimed copyright ownership on his work.)
As with most other Commonwealth of Nations countries, Canada and
Australia follow the general lead of the United Kingdom on copyright
of government works. Both have a version of Crown Copyright which
lasts for 50 years from publication. New Zealand also has Crown
Copyright protection, but has a much greater time length of protection
at 100 years from the date of publication. Ireland also has a fifty
year term on government works, although since it is no longer a
monarchy, such protection is, of course, not called Crown Copyright.
India has a government copyright of sixty years from publication, to
coincide with its somewhat unusual life of the author plus sixty years
term of copyright.
Examples of inventions whose patents have expired include the
inventions of Thomas Edison. Examples of works whose copyrights have
expired include the works of Carlo Collodi and most of the works of
Mark Twain. Examples of works under a statutory perpetual copyright
include many of the Peter Pan works by J. M. Barrie; this was granted
by the British government and applies only within the United Kingdom.
Other works, such as the works of The Walt Disney Company are not
under a de jure statutory perpetual copyright because the United
States Constitution requires copyrights to last "for limited Times"
(Article I, section 8, clause 8). However, the limits have been
retroactively extended several times, leading to longer and longer
protections. Critics have observed that the extensions have taken
place right before noteworthy works from Disney and others were about
to expire, concluding that such copyright term extensions add up to de
facto perpetual copyright. Disney and other large publishers routinely
provide millions of U.S. dollars in campaign money to legislators,
allegedly in exchange for these continued extensions.
DISCLAIMER OF INTEREST:
In the past, in some jurisdictions such as the USA, a work would
enter the public domain with respect to copyright if it was released
without a copyright notice. This is no longer the case. Any work
receives copyright by default and copyright law generally doesn't
provide any special means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can
enter the public domain (in the USA, the Computer Software Rental
Amendments Act of 1990 provides a registration mechanism for public
domain computer programs at the Library of Congress, but it is still
not explained how the work should be placed in the public domain in
the first place).
A copyright holder can explicitly disclaim any proprietary interest
in the work, effectively granting it to the public domain, by
providing a licence to this effect. A suitable licence will grant
permission for all of the acts which are restricted by copyright law.
With regards to patents on the other hand, publishing the details
of an invention before applying for a patent will generally place an
invention in the public domain and prevent its subsequent patenting by
others. For example, once a journal publishes a mathematical formula,
it may no longer be used as the core of a claim in a software patent.
There is an exception to this, however: in U.S. (not European) law, an
inventor may file a patent claim up to one year after publishing it
(but not, of course, if someone else published it first).
INELIGIBAILITY:
Laws may make some types of works and inventions ineligible for
monopoly; such works immediately enter the public domain upon
publication. For example, U.S. copyright law, 17 U.S.C. § 105,
releases all works created by the U.S. government into the public
domain, patent applications as part of the terms of granting the
patent to the invention are public domain, patent law excludes
inventions that obviously follow from prior art, and agreements that
Germany signed at the end of World War I released such trademarks as
"aspirin" and "heroin" into the public domain in many areas.
LICENSING:
Note that there are many works that are not part of the public
domain, but for which the owner of some proprietary rights has chosen
not to enforce those rights, or to grant some subset of those rights
to the public. See, for example, the Free Software Foundation which
creates copyrighted software and licenses it without charge to the
public for most uses under a class of license called "copyleft",
forbidding only proprietary redistribution. BambooWeb does much the
same thing with its content under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Sometimes such work is mistakenly referred to as "public domain" in
colloquial speech.
Note also that while some works (especially musical works) may be
in the public domain, U.S. law considers transcriptions or
performances of those works to be derivative works, potentially
subject to their own copyrights.
THE ROLE IN SOCIETY:
"Public access to literature, art, music, and film is essential to
preserving and building on our cultural heritage. Many of the most
important works of American culture have drawn upon the creative
potential of the public domain. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is
a classic example of a film that did not enjoy popular success until
it entered the public domain. Other icons such as Snow White,
Pinocchio, Santa Claus and Uncle Sam grew out of public domain
figures."
PUBLIC DOMAIN AND THE INTERNET:
Historically, the vast majority of copyright and other licensing
issues arising from misunderstandings about the legal definition of
"public domain" fell into two camps:
Businesses and organizations who could devote staff to resolving
legal conflicts through negotiation and the court system.
Individual and organizational use of materials covered by the fair use
doctrine, reducing the need for substantial governmental or corporate
resources to track down individual offenders.
With the advent of the Internet, however, it became possible for
anybody with access to this worldwide network to "post" copyrighted or
otherwise-licensed materials freely and easily. This aggravated an
already established but false belief that, if something is available
through a free source, it must be public domain. Once such material
was available on the net, it could be perfectly copied among thousands
or even millions of computers very quickly and essentially without
cost.
These factors have reinforced the false notion that "freely
obtained" means "public domain". One could argue that the Internet is
a publicly-available domain, not licensed or controlled by any
individual, company, or government; therefore, everything on the
Internet is public domain. This specious argument ignores the fact
that licensing rights are not dependent on the means of distribution
or consumer acquisition. (If someone gives you stolen merchandise, it
is still stolen, even if you weren't aware of it.) Chasing down
copyright violations based on the erroneous idea that "information is
free" (see Footnotes below) has become a primary focus of industries
whose financial structure is based on their control of the
distribution of such media. Though this is legally correct, public
support for these companies' efforts is significantly undermined by
the belief that they are receiving their "just desserts" for decades
of price-gouging for licensed media. Ironically, this puts many
creators of such work, like musicians and authors, on both sides of
the issue, since they have frequently fought media distributors over
inadequate compensation for their work, but depend on distributors'
revenues for that compensation.
Another complication is that publishing exclusively on the Internet
has become extremely popular. According to U.S. law, at least, an
author's original works are covered by copyright, even without a
formal notice incorporated into the work. But such laws were passed at
a time when the focus was on materials that could not be as easily and
cheaply reproduced as digital media, nor did they comprehend the
ultimate impossibility of determining which set of electronic bits is
original. Technically, any Internet posting (such as blogs or emails)
could be considered protected material unless explicitly stated
otherwise. (Many Internet content providers attempt to assert
copyrights by claiming all ownership and reproduction rights to any
material posted to their servers, but the potential for conflicting
claims has not been adequately tested.) Traditional methods of proving
original work, such as physically mailing a sealed copy of one's work
to oneself, thereby gaining a dated stamp from a governmental agency
(i.e., the local Postal Service), are irrelevant for this new source
of creative work.
SOURCE: http://www.bambooweb.com/articles/p/u/Public_Domain.html |
