"Neither the Copyright and Patent Clause nor the First Amendment, we hold, makes the public domain, in any and all cases, a territory that works may never exit. "
posted by burnfirewalls on Jan 19, 2012 - 96 comments

Every January 1 is Public Domain Day, when new authors enter the public domain. Copyright law is "fiendishly complex", but using the generic "life plus seventy" rule, here are some of the authors who enter the public domain today. What could have been entering the public domain today under the pre-1978-era law (Fellowship of the Ring, Dr. Seuss, etc..).. but you can expect further endless extensions of copyright to come. More articles here, here.
posted by stbalbach on Jan 1, 2011 - 115 comments

Copyright turns 300: An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, also known as the Statute of Anne, became law on April 10, 1710.
posted by Horace Rumpole on Apr 10, 2010 - 19 comments

Public Domain Day 2010. This is the day when a year’s worth of copyrights expire in many countries around the world.^{Year of death + 70: (disclaimer)} But in some other countries, it is a bittersweet day. The United States, Australia, Russia, and Mexico are in the midst of public domain freezes.
posted by stbalbach on Dec 31, 2009 - 40 comments

Google makes public domain books available for instant custom printing. Show up anywhere that has one of the book printing machines. Select one of the millions of public domain titles in Google Books digital library. Pay around the price of a mass market paperback. The machine then prints a copy of your desired book* in a few minutes, as demonstrated in this lovingly narrated video. [more inside]
posted by voltairemodern on Sep 17, 2009 - 50 comments

His is the most vigorously defended copyright in history, the reason behind the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. But Mickey Mouse may already be in the public domain. (Via)
posted by Astro Zombie on Aug 22, 2008 - 56 comments

Copyright, copywrong, copyleft, copyWHAT?! Peter Hirtle is no stranger to the questions surrounding copyright and the use of public domain materials. He has been thoroughl in researching and referencing other's work in this area. Peter's handy little chart could not have been more timely; it was really long overdue. But it really just gets overwhelming sometimes ... I blame it all on that d*m**d mouse! [more inside]
posted by aldus_manutius on Jul 16, 2008 - 16 comments

"For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable." How do you know? The renewal copyright records have traditionally been scattered and hard to access, but Google - with the help of Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word - has just released a single database as a freely downloadable XML file.
posted by stbalbach on Jun 25, 2008 - 54 comments

djb releases code to public domain, including qmail. [more inside]
posted by finite on Nov 30, 2007 - 48 comments

The non-profit group, Public.resource.org, are challenging the Smithsonian Institution by downloading all 6,288 (mostly) public domain photographs from the very restrictive Smithsonian Images site and reposting them to Flickr. [more: here, here] {via Ramage}
posted by peacay on May 18, 2007 - 25 comments

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales asks: Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license? Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it. And they do.
posted by divabat on Oct 22, 2006 - 60 comments

Free Movies, Documentaries, Cartoons, TV-Shows, Music & Comedy - 100% handpicked content chosen to inform, educate, shock and entertain you. Most of the old films and cartoons are in public domain: "when a work's copyright or patent restrictions expire, it enters the public domain and may be used by anyone for any purpose." The newer media is probably not in public domain, they are just freely available for some unknown reason. Tomorrow they could be gone.
posted by crunchland on Sep 18, 2006 - 19 comments

Night of the Living Dead in 95 minutes with bunnies. I lied about the bunnies.
posted by God on Mar 26, 2004 - 13 comments

An anotated list of the best-selling classics, (as compiled by Book Magazine), showing the years in which they will become public domain under current copyright law. Fans of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises will be in luck in 2021; Memoirs of a Geisha will go public sometime in the early 2100s.
[Via Vidiot's brand new blog.]
posted by me3dia on Aug 27, 2003 - 5 comments

Ask not what the public domain can do for you... (...ask what you can do for the public domain.) The Eldred vs. Ashcroft folks are circulating a petition proposing a federal law requiring $1 copyright renewal after 50 years, or the work hits the public domain. The name-rank-serial# form has an interesting question: List something you have created using the public domain. Some of the answers: Audiotexts of Aesop's Fables, annotation of Descartes' Discours, Digital Historia Numorum: A Manual of Greek Numismatics, choral sheet-music library, Mercury Theatre on the Air, a pop opera based on Cyrano, NASA images jigsaw puzzle, French proverbs from 1611, blind audio tactile mapping system, Alexandre Dumas père website, Light and Matter physics text, Voice of Hibakusha: Eyewitness accounts of Hiroshima, Distributed RNA Secondary Structure Prediction, least-squares fitting library, collection of chess problem books, Philately of the Princely States of India, Oremus Hymnal, Allen Parker slave narrative site, Samuel Johnson's Ramblers, 18th-century Chester Co. PA tax liststranslation of Jose Zorrilla's Don Juan (1844) , Digital South-Asia Language Archive, Vedic etexts, Gary Indiana U.S. Steel Works Photograph Collection, et al. The above list was so diverse...led me to wonder, what works have Mefites created using public domain materials?
posted by jengod on Jun 16, 2003 - 20 comments

Creative Commons license: could it force you to suffer for your users' sins? Dan Bricklin says the liability clauses could do just that. MonkeyX says the benefits outweigh the risks. The Commoners respond. Ming the Mechanic and others prefer an alternative scheme: Primarily Public Domain, in which all content is donated to the public domain by default unless otherwise specified. And then there's plain old-fashioned copyright, like MeFi. How do you limit the incorporation of your cyberself?
posted by hairyeyeball on May 22, 2003 - 18 comments

Left Gets Nod from Right on Copyright Law - A darling of the conservative movement, federal Judge Richard Posner criticizes the Sonny Bono Act and attacks the Patent and Trademark Office for granting "very questionable" business method patents at a lecture organized by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. (via How Appealing)
posted by ajr on Nov 21, 2002 - 11 comments

What do Margaret Mitchell , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , George Orwell & Adolf Hitler have in common - other than that they are authors? [Answer inside]
posted by dash_slot- on Oct 23, 2002 - 21 comments