Happy Public Domain Day from the CSPD

Holliman
1/4/2010 - 2:31pm
  1. Legal, Licensing & Copyright
  1. copyright
  2. intellectual property
  3. public domain
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Marilyn Monroe's Playboy cover, The Adventures of Augie March, Watson and Crick's Nature paper on the structure of DNA...  What do all of these things have in common? They were once scheduled to enter the public domain tomorrow.  Now, we will have to wait until 2049.

Public Domain Day, held on January 1st each year, celebrates the day when copyright protection expires and works enter the public domain. The CSPD is marking Public Domain Day with a new website at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday

As the site explains, while other countries around the world will at least be seeing works by some authors enter the public domain - from Freud to Yeats - in the United States no published works will be entering the public domain until 2019.

You can read more about what could have entered the public domain in the US, how the public domain is shrinking, why it matters, and answers to frequently asked questions, at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday