Public domain

The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply.

[3][4] As examples, the works of William Shakespeare, Ludwig van Beethoven, Miguel de Cervantes, Zoroaster, Lao Zi, Confucius, Aristotle, L. Frank Baum, Leonardo da Vinci and Georges Méliès are in the public domain either by virtue of their having been created before copyright existed, or by their copyright term having expired.

[5] Other works are actively dedicated by their authors to the public domain (see waiver); examples include reference implementations of cryptographic algorithms.

[8][page needed] When the first early copyright law was originally established in Britain with the Statute of Anne in 1710, public domain did not appear.

Instead of "public domain", they used terms such as publici juris or propriété publique to describe works that were not covered by copyright law.

[11] The phrase "fall in the public domain" can be traced to mid-19th-century France to describe the end of copyright term.

The French poet Alfred de Vigny equated the expiration of copyright with a work falling "into the sink hole of public domain"[12] and if the public domain receives any attention from intellectual property lawyers it is still treated as little more than that which is left when intellectual property rights, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks, expire or are abandoned.

[7] In this historical context Paul Torremans describes copyright as a, "little coral reef of private right jutting up from the ocean of the public domain.

Such a definition regards work in copyright as private property subject to fair use rights and limitation on ownership.

[15] Patterson and Lindberg described the public domain not as a "territory", but rather as a concept: "[T]here are certain materials – the air we breathe, sunlight, rain, space, life, creations, thoughts, feelings, ideas, words, numbers – not subject to private ownership.

[clarification needed][18] In most countries the term of protection of copyright expires on the first day of January, 70 years after the death of the latest living author.

[20] For example: the works of Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Machado de Assis, Olavo Bilac and Edgar Allan Poe are in the public domain worldwide as they all died over 100 years ago.

[21] Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and Wikisource make tens of thousands of public domain books available online as ebooks.

[25] This laid the foundation for the preservation of global music in the public domain, a distinction formalized alongside copyright systems in the 17th century.

US copyright laws distinguish between musical compositions and sound recordings, the former of which refers to melody, notation or lyrics created by a composer or lyricist, including sheet music, and the latter referring to a recording performed by an artist, including a CD, LP, or digital sound file.

[26] Musical compositions fall under the same general rules as other works, and anything published before 1925 is considered public domain.

Sound recordings, on the other hand, are subject to different rules and are not eligible for public domain status until 2021–2067, depending on the date and location of publishing, unless explicitly released beforehand.

[36][37] In addition to straightforward adaptation, they have been used as the launching point for transformative retellings such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Troma Entertainment's Tromeo and Juliet.

Therefore, photos taken by the museum, even of material that itself had fallen into the public domain, were protected by copyright law and would need to be removed from the Wikimedia image repository.

In the United Kingdom, for example, there is a perpetual crown copyright for the Authorized King James Version of the Bible.

[49] The underlying idea that is expressed or manifested in the creation of a work generally cannot be the subject of copyright law (see idea–expression divide).

[citation needed] Legal traditions differ on whether a work in the public domain can have its copyright restored.

However, the United States moved away from that tradition with the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, which removed from the public domain many foreign-sourced works that had previously not been in copyright in the US for failure to comply with US-based formalities requirements.

[52] Works of various governments around the world may be excluded from copyright law and may therefore be considered to be in the public domain in their respective countries.

[55][56] Not all legal systems have processes for reliably donating works to the public domain, e.g. civil law of continental Europe.

[59] For example, a CC BY license allows for re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon material, while also agreeing to provide attribution to the author in any of these cases.

A solution to this issue (as found in the Creative Commons Zero dedication) is to interpret the license by setting "three different layers of action.

Bayer lost the trademark in the United States, the UK and France after World War I, as part of the Treaty of Versailles.