Happy Public Domain Day 2010!
Today January 1st 2010, many will have been celebrating Public Domain Day which is all about the value of the public domain and the need to prevent its demise. Each year on this day, copyright protection expires for millions of creative works, which then allows those works to be used, repurposed and built upon by anyone, without restriction or need for permission.
The copyright terms specified by the Berne Convention bring works into the public domain on the first January 1 that’s more than 50 years after the death of their authors. Today, most works by authors who died in 1958 join the public domain in those countries, more information here.
Many countries, have unfortunately extended their copyright terms in recent years, this includes most European Union countries who took 20 years worth of works out of the public domain in the 1990s when the EU mandated that copyright terms be extended to run for the life of the author plus 70 years. This year, they come a little bit closer to recovering their lost public domain, welcoming back works by authors who died in 1938, including people like Karel Capek, Zona Gale, Georges Melies, Constantin Stanislavsky, Osip Mandelstam, Owen Wister, and Thomas Wolfe.
This year has witnessed a growth in the number of organizations and websites dedicated to celebrating and promoting Public Domain Day.
COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain and an organization in which Creative Commons is a member, has started a new website devoted to Public Domain Day that includes resources such as public domain calculators, information about countries’ copyright terms, and related information. The “project aims at increasing public awareness of this celebration and educating about the Public Domain concept and its potentialities for spreading culture and knowledge worldwide.”
The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has several valuable web pages dedicated to Public Domain Day, including a detailed FAQ. As the site explains, “On the first day of each year, Public Domain Day celebrates the moment when copyrights expire. The films, photos, books and symphonies whose copyright term has finished have become to quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis“free as the air to common use.”
The Creative Commons licencing system which is now in its 8th year, plans to increase their focus and effort in the public domain arena. Here are a few highlights of what you can look forward to:
In 2009, Creative Commons launched the CC0 waiver, a tool that allowed creators to effectively place their works in the public domain through a waiver of all copyright to the extent permitted by law.
In 2010 Creative Commons will be increasing development efforts on their public domain assertion tool. This tool will enable members of the public and organizations such as libraries and museums to mark and tag public domain works available over the Internet. Although long in the development cycle, the demand and desire for such a protocol endures.
LibriVox has just reached a grand total of 2000 recordings of books which they have placed in the public domain. Number 2000 is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. VI. Listen to all six volumes in 2009!
Google Books and the Open Content Alliance, are digitizing books and other works that libraries have acquired and preserved. Many of the digitized works are in the public domain, and these projects have been making them freely readable and downloadable when they can confirm their public domain status. And now that Google has negotiated a settlement with book publisher and author groups, they plan to be more proactive about identifying and releasing public domain works, including works published after 1922 that are out of copyright .
Many books have been part of the public domain for years, but if they were simply sitting on the shelves of a few research libraries, they weren’t available to the general public. Once they’re digitized, though, and their digitizations and descriptions are shared online, they can be much more easily found, read, adapted, and reused by anyone online. By opening up the treasure trove of public domain expression that libraries have preserved, we magnify its value. When libraries share their intellectual endowment, they better fulfill their mission to bring art and knowledge to readers, and make it easy for readers to learn, build on, and be enriched by this knowledge.
Creative Commons Board Chair James Boyle’s has published a new book entitled ‘The Public Domain: Enclosing of the Commons of the Mind’. You can Read and download and share the the PDF under a CC BY-NC-SA license here.
The Public Domain covers the history, theory, and future of the public domain, taking a broad conception of the meaning and import of the public domain, here is a short excerpt from the preface to The Public Domain
When the subject is intellectual property, this gap in our knowledge turns out to be important because our intellectual property system depends on a balance between what is property and what is not. For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. 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.” Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone.
Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment.
We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it.
Happy Public Domain Day 2010!