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"Public Domain"
The conference on Orphan Works & Mass Digitization, hosted by the Law School at the University of California, Berkeley last week, was exciting — at least to the 230 copyright geeks like me who attended — and filled with well-researched papers. The three White Papers that were prepared by the Samuelson Law, Technology [...]
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Today the Supreme Court issued a decision in the case of Golan v. Holder which is a significant defeat, I think, for the public domain in the United States. Reading the opinion has made me wonder if we have really strayed from our fundamental commitments about intellectual property.
The case involved the complex and technical [...]
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The Supreme Court on Monday granted certiorari , which is the technical language for agreeing to hear a case, in Golan v. Holder, a copyright case with potentially significant implications for the public domain in the U.S. I wrote about this case back in 2009, when it was first decided by a federal District [...]
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Happy New Year to all!
Just before and after the first of the new year, I saw a flurry of e-mails and blog posts celebrating this year’s Public Domain Day. January 1 is the day on which all the material whose copyright expired during the previous year officially rises into the public domain and becomes [...]
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I do not usually use this space simply to offer links to other resources without adding my own comments, but this 16 minute video by Johanna Blakely of the Norman Lear Center at USC — “Lessons from fashion’s free culture” – is so good there is very little I can add.
Dr. Blakely discusses, [...]
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Mark Twain once wrote in his Notebooks that “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.” It has been a full century since Twain’s death in 1910 and he is just now presenting us with good evidence for the truth of his comment.
The gist [...]
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In my only previous foray into the issues of protection for traditional knowledge, I was quite critical of the legal regime used in Ghana to claim control and profit over the knowledge creations of indigenous peoples. Even while criticizing the law, however, I admitted that there was a great deal of abuse that needed [...]
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At a meeting about public access to federally-funded research that I attended earlier in the year, a publisher strenuously asserted that it was not the role of the government to drive a business out of the market. He was right of course, but so were a group of us who replied that neither was it [...]
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Section 105 of the U.S. Copyright Law tells us that there can be no copyright in works of the federal government. Almost uniquely among the nations of the world, the US government does not get to exclude others (including taxpayers) from using works created by government employees as part of their employment. There are numerous [...]
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By Will Cross
If you follow libraries and scholarly communications you’ve probably seen this phrase pop up online recently: “cutting libraries in a recession is like cutting hospitals in a plague.” Eleanor Crumblehulme’s pithy tweet has gone viral and launched a minor publicity campaign that is making the rounds online and in libraries. [...]
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As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. 
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