Hi, I'm Ann Gilliland, I'm the scholarly communications officer at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and today I'm going to talk to you about the public domain. So what is the public domain? Material that is not in copyright, and or that is not copyrightable, and is free to use, is in the public domain. Con, this content can be reproduced for all kinds of purposes. It's possible to make derivative works with public domain material and so on. Essentially there is no copyright on public domain work. However, it's important to remember that plagiarism and copyright infringement are two related but different things. So it's certainly possible to plagiarise a public domain work even if copyright infringement is not applicable in a public domain situation. So, what are some examples of public domain material? One of the ones that's very important for us in the U.S. is U.S. government material. Most of the work produced by the federal government in this country is not copyrighted, and it is free to be used by the citizens of this country in a variety of ways, to be distributed widely, to be reproduced, and so on. Now, there are a few exceptions, of course, to that rule. Occasionally, some US government contractor work is in copyright, but most of it is not. Another thing to note is that state government work the public domain status of that work is less clear. Some states assert copyright in their state publications of various sorts, other states do not. And many states have a sort of vague and gray area there. It's also important to remember that in other countries. The way the public domain for ca, government material is handled can be quite different. For example, in the UK, crown copyright is something that is, works in a different sort of way than US government material that is not in copyright. Some more examples of material that is in the public domain. One of those is work published during the time when the formalities, that means the registration and notice that we talked about earlier, were required, but they weren't observed. So for example, if a work was produced during a time when you needed to re, register the work or renew the work and those things weren't done then the work would fall into the public domain. If a work was produced during a time when you needed to provide the notice, a C with a circle around it and that wasn't done, the work would fall into the pubic domain. As, as we noted in our re, resources materials, one of the things that's super, super useful in figuring out those sorts of time-based and formalities-based public domain rules are a chart created by Peter Hirtle at Cornell. That is in, in your resources materials too, to refer to. And it, that is an invaluable work to look at for the very complicated rules about when the copyright term expired, or when things were not done in a way that would have made copyright happen in former years. And one thing to remember, as you look at public domain work, is the copyright is not intended to last forever. The constitution says it's for a limited time, and so there are some benefits that we feel we get by having material eventually come into the public domain one way or the other. Another way that material can go into the public domain is that the rights owner can release it to the public if he or she wishes to. Doesn't happen super frequently but some people do do that. And one thing to note that this release should be irrevocable. So for example, if I create a painting and I decide to release it to the public domain, and people start to reuse the painting. If I then change my mind and say, gee, I shouldn't have done that people have relied on my release, and it wouldn't be fair and equitable to allow me to then take the painting back into copyright. Another thing to remember is that there are some materials that can just be copyrighted and they, they never were copyrighted to begin with such as ideas facts, slogans and useful objects. However, there are other intellectual property systems such as trademark and patent that may cover this material even if copyright does not. The public domain is not growing like it did at one time, and copyright terms are lengthening. So, and this means that work is not coming into the public domain like we would like, once saw it in previous times. Plus the fact that copyright happens without formalities of notice of registration and renewal now, means that the public domain is, is, in a way, shrinking copyright terms today. They are much longer than they were when the founders wrote the Constitution. Some of the reasons that is true the laws have been changed because of business reasons and commercialization of copyrighted material. People live longer, and so there's been a desire to have the copyright last longer and provide revenue for creators during that time. Many creators have a desire to provide for their heirs, and so there has been a, a move towards lengthening copyright terms for all of those reasons. Although there are some good reasons why people and entities have wanted to extend copyright terms copyright is not supposed to last forever, and there are some consequences from those kinds of expansion of terms. Most recently, the Copyright Terms Extension Act of 1998 gave an additional 20 years onto the copyright term. In a lawsuit that followed the enactment of that statute. The Supreme Court said that Congress had the ability to lengthen terms, as long as they were for a limited time, even if that time was a long time, as, as long as it was still limited. However, in many ways the lengthened copyright terms are unwieldy. Copyright terms extend quite a bit beyond a creator's life at this point, and so it's often true that in the later part of a copyright term, it's hard to tell if a work is still in copyright. It's hard to tell who the creator was, and it's hard to find the creator or his or her heirs. This means that it's more difficult to reproduce work with permission or to make derivative works and so on. Since copyright terms have become longer, and they have been judged constitutional, we've had an opportunity to see that in many times they don't work very well. Because they extend beyond the copyright owners lifetime and because there are no formalities today, we often have these situations where we can't find the rights owner any longer and we often refer to these as copyright orphans. They the, the works are still available, but we don't know who made them or we can't locate those people now. Some of those works are in a sort of a limbo where it is difficult to re-use them or commercialize them again. Can work be plucked out of the public domain and put back into copyright? I just said that an individual can't do this. That if an individual releases a work to the public domain, he or she can't then put it back into copyright later. But Congress can do this. And Congress did do this with a statue that restored copyrights in work where the formalities weren't observed during the 20th century. These were works like for example, from Soviet music composers where the Cold War prevented those composers from registering or renewing their work and so it lapsed into the public domain. Congress allowed the copy right in those works to be restored so that the copyright status in the US mirrored the copyright status in the home country. And consequently, it's very, very difficult, just as a footnote to trace copyright status of international works published in the 20th century. In some cases because of this sort of restoration that happened. So why do we care about the public domain? The public domain is more than just work that is old and we don't, no one's using it anymore, we don't care about it. It's more than work that's simply not being commercialized anymore. It has work that has stood the test of time in many cases. And has really truly become part of our cultural heritage. One of the things that is important about a vibrant and growing public domain is that we all profit when expression isn't controlled too tightly. The ability to reuse and distribute older works is in all of our interests as we participate in the world of scholarship and in, of the world of ideas and in the world of our culture in general.
