Under thr 1909 copyright law, formalities (concerning notice and registration) were very important. I do not find it surprising then that the Disney’s may have messed up their copyright notice. The law then was that if there existed any ambiguity in the notice, then copyright was void. Of course, when a young law student working [...]
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Last month the British government rejected extending copyright terms for sound recordings (currently 50 years). Of course the music industry cried that the government did not support musicians and artists. But I’ll let that specious argument go for today. Even thought the government would have had get the European Commission to change the uniform copyright law, it [...]
Filed under: Copyright, Public Domain | 1 Comment »
Kahle v. Gonzales is an attempt to reverse the change of copyright protection in the United States from an opt-in system to an opt-out system brought by the Copyright Renewal Act (CRA) of 1992 and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). Plaintiffs, who were using works that had fallen into public domain, claimed the change [...]
Filed under: 2007 Copyright Cases, Copyright, Fair Use, Orphan Works, Public Domain | 1 Comment »
Definition: A public domain work is a creative work that is not protected by copyright and which may be freely used by everyone. The reasons that the work is not protected include: (1) the term of copyright for the work has expired; (2) the author failed to satisfy statutory formalities to perfect the copyright or (3) [...]
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As an example of how the public domain enhances public culture and discourse, I thought I would venture forth and see what was available. I chose Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche because it is the drop off point for a large part of modern thought and was first published in 1886. It turns [...]
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Google announced last week that it would make public domain books download-able in PDF format. While a legitimate use of the technology and the scanning of a number of libraries around the world, in the future a book will be available for download the day it goes out of copyright. While this might not seem [...]
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