Today's copyright tidbit is about works that are not protected by copyright. These unprotected works are part of the public domain, meaning that they belong to everyone. There are two types of works in the public domain: non-creative works, and creative works that have lost their copyright protection.
Non-creative Works in the Public Domain
Works without creative content (made purely of fact) cannot be protected by copyright. These are always in the public domain. This can be a little tricky to understand.
- The CONTENT on a Periodic Table of Elements cannot be copyrighted, because it is simply factual information about each element. However, if someone has designed a poster with the Periodic Table of Elements on it, then the poster itself can be protected by copyright because there is creative design work on it.
- Another example: phone books are not copyrighted. They are alphabetized lists of names and phone numbers, and they do not have creative content that would garner copyright protection.
Creative Works that Have Lost Their Copyright Protection
Works that were published before January 1, 1923 are in the public domain. (The year for this rule does not change --- it is always 1923.)
Be wary of assuming that something old is in the public domain, however, because only the original work is considered public domain:
- Arrangements of Beethoven's symphonies that were created after 1923 are not public domain.
- Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet itself is no longer protected by copyright. However, if someone publishes a new edition with new illustrations or a new afterword, these new additions would be copyrighted. So if you were to photocopy each page of a play for your students, and there were notes, modifications, or adaptations that had happened since 1923, you would still be violating copyright by distributing these.
Copyright on creative works usually expires after a certain amount of years. Generally this is based on when the author died, however this gets a little murky because there are options for copyright extension, and laws have been different at different points in the Twentieth Century. Your safest bet is to check whether a work is copyrighted before you decide to use it.
http://www.copyright.gov is a very helpful resource.
Dedicating a Work to the Public Domain
It can be very tricky and complicated for a creator to legally dedicate his work to the public domain. The alternative is for the creator to assign a Creative Commons License specifying which of the six rights of copyright protection he is giving to the public.
