The Public Domain Enhancement ActFirst time here?
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Introduction
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This site serves as the focal point for information about the campaign to restore balance to copyright laws by expanding the public domain. Founded as part of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the legal action to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act (Phase I), it now houses all the documents from that case, as well as new and up-to-date information about advocacy efforts to reclaim the public domain through legislation.
Latest News
COPYRIGHT OFFICE ANNOUNCES ORPHAN WORKS STUDY
The Copyright Office seeks to examine the issues raised by "orphan works," that is, copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating them in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public. The Copyright Office requests written comments from all interested parties on whether there are compelling concerns raised by orphan works that merit a legislative, regulatory, or other solution, and if so, what type of solution could effectively address these concerns without conflicting with the legitimate interests of authors and right holders. Comments are due by 5:00 p.m. EST on March 25, 2005. For detailed information on submission requirements and further information, go to the Copyright Office's website.
January 27, 2005
Copyright reform is vital to the spread of culture and information, Lessig writes in the LA Times, commenting on Google's ablility to withstand the potential liability issues with scanning in books to search, liability which chills almost everyone else. He notes that legislation is needed to promote simple techniques for filtering out works that have no continuing need for copyright protection:
How would it work? One proposal calls for copyrights to be renewed every five
years -- a process that today could be made technically quite simple and that
would create an accessible database as well as quickly clear away unneeded
copyrights.
Clarifying the system, however, has been universally opposed by the content
industry -- Hollywood, book publishers and the like. It fears that any reform
would weaken Congress' resolve to strongly protect intellectual property. So
while it insists upon increased regulation to protect commercially valuable
work, it works to block reform that would enable a wide range of creative work
to be efficiently built on by others.
January 12, 2005
On January 1, 2005 the original recording of Elvis' That's All Right enters the public domain and European lobbyists are angling to change the law to protect RCA's royalties, according to Becky Hogge.
Under current EU law, sound recordings are classified as “performance” and copyrighted for a period of 50 years. This is not to be confused with compositions, which remain in copyright for the artist's lifetime plus 70 years, preventing others from covering or sampling the track without paying some royalties.
Nevertheless what this law does mean is that, from January, anyone may store, share, swap or commercially release That's All Right without recourse to RCA, who currently own rights to the track as part of their back catalogue. Further, over the next decade and beyond, other such seminal recordings - from Chuck Berry to Johnny Cash and, eventually, The Beatles - will come into the public domain.
August 12, 2004
Ireland is poised to pass the Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Bill 2004, that "will remove any doubt as to the right of any person to place literary or artistic works protected by copyright or copies thereof on public exhibition without committing a breach of copyright", according to an explanatory memorandum of the legislation.
Why? To ensure that a major exhibition of James Joyce's work at the National Library can proceed despite threats from the author's grandson. Turns out the government owns the manuscripts they want to exhibit, but the grandson own's the copyrights--- copyrights that ran out on December 31st, 1991, 50 years after Joyce's death but were revived by EU regulations in July 1995 when it extended the lifetime of copyright to 70 years after an author's death.
This is what Kahle vs. Ashcroft is about.
June 1, 2004
Golan v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit challenging Congress's removal of thousands of works from the public domain. In 1994, Congress enacted a copyright provision under § 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act that removes many foreign works from the public domain and grants them "restored" copyrights. The law, which is codified at 17 U.S.C. §§ 104A and 109(a), takes away the public's long held rights to freely use these works -- which are now controlled by "restored" copyright holders.
The lawyers are looking for examples where people wanted to use a work that had been in the public domain, but whose copyright was restored, preventing the use. You can submit your stories, and/or read other peoples stories here.
May 21, 2004
unreasonable people are the problem with reasonable compromises
In an article in The National Journal on May 8, 2004 (not online), Neil Munro writes that "Fritz Attaway, general counsel of the MPAA, even opposes a Lessig proposal that copyright owners be required to pay a dollar to extend their copyright period beyond 50 years or so."
May 13, 2004
canada's house of commons rejects copyright term extension
Anne heirs fail in copyright bid
WebPosted Apr 6 2004 10:48 AM AD TOTTAWA
A bill to extend copyright protection which would have benefited the heirs of Lucy Maude Montgomery has been rejected by the House of Commons. The bill would have extended copyright protection for the unpublished works of dead authors until the year 2017. The bill would have appled to authors who died between 1930 and 1949. Montgomery died in 1942. The L.M. Montgomery estate and others were lobbying the federal government to extend the protection for unpublished works. Once copyright protection expires literary works become public domain, so that anyone can publish the material without permission and without paying.
April 6, 2004
Effort to Save "Orphan Works" Moves to Court
In Kahle v. Ashcroft, two archives ask the U.S. district court for the Northern District of California to find that a law that extended copyright terms unconditionally -- the Berne Convention Implementation Act (BCIA) -- is unconstitutional under the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and that the BCIA and Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) together create an "effectively perpetual" term with respect to works first published after January 1, 1964 and before January 1, 1978, in violation of the Constitution's Progress Clause. The complaint asks the court for a declaratory judgement ruling, stating that copyright restrictions on orphaned works -- works whose copyright has not expired but which are no longer available -- violates the constitution.
From lessig blog:
Pundit watch: you’ll be able to identify a pundit who has not read either Eldred or the complaint when they suggest the case is the same as Eldred was. It is not. Indeed, the claims are fundamentally different. The only relation between the two is that Kahle/Prelinger v. Ashcroft follows the rules suggested in Eldred for challenging Congress’s transformation of the traditional contours of copyright law. Eldred said: tradition matters. This case says: the tradition was radically changed.
If the case were to prevail, Congress would have to reenact the Sonny Bono Act to protect non-orphaned works. Of course, there’d be more opposition now, so it’s not clear such a law would pass, but under Eldred, they’d be free to do so. Or, alternatively, Congress might moot the case by passing a law that effectively imposed a renewal requirement. Say, for example, the PDEA.
Slashdot dicusses.
March 23, 2004
EFFORT TO RECLAIM PUBLIC DOMAIN SCORES VICTORY
Court Allows Challenge (Golan v. Ashcroft) to Re-copyrighting Public Domain Works to Proceed
Stanford, CA - A major roadblock to reclaiming content for the public
domain was removed today, when a U.S. District Court ruled that a
case challenging re-copyrighting of public domain materials could
proceed despite the government's insistence that the Supreme
Court's decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft invalidated the claims.
"Lawrence Golan, the conductor of the University of Denver's Lamont
Symphony Orchestra, and the other artists involved will get their
chance to show how severely they have been harmed by Congress's
removal of numerous artistic works from the public domain by the
grant of so-called 'restored' copyrights." said Edward Lee, Assistant
Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law
and one of the attorneys for the Plaintiffs.
In the case, Golan and the other plaintiffs argued that Section 514
of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) is unconstitutional
because re-copyrighting works does not promote progress as required
by the Copyright Clause, abridges speech in violation of the First
Amendment, and violates Due Process by depriving the public of
the free availability of public domain works. Section 514 of the
URAA was enacted in 1994 after the Uruguay Agreement negotiations
and is now codified at 17 U.S.C. 104(a). While striking one term
extension challenge based on the Eldred case, US District Court
Chief Judge Lewis T. Babcock, rejected the government's Motion to
Dismiss the case and allowed the plaintiff's three remaining
claims to proceed.
Continue reading "EFFORT TO RECLAIM PUBLIC DOMAIN SCORES VICTORY"
March 16, 2004
In this article adapted from his upcoming book, Eldred v. Ashcroft lead counsel Larry Lessig explains how the decision how to argue Eldred was made, and what he believes went wrong.
In the lines quoted below, he explains how the commercial life of a work ends, and why digital technologies can give these works new life, if only the works entered the public domain or people could find their original authors to get permission.
Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device. But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short. Most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends. Copyrights in this context do no good.
Yet for most of our history, they also did little harm. When a work ended its commercial life, there was no copyright-related use that would be inhibited by an exclusive right. When a book went out of print, you could not buy it from a publisher. But you could still buy it from a used bookstore, and when a used bookstore sells it, at least in the United States, there is no need to pay the copyright owner anything. Thus, the ordinary use of a book after its commercial life ended was a use that was independent of copyright law. The same was effectively true of film. Because the costs of restoring a film—the real economic costs, not the attorneys' fees—were so high, it was never at all feasible to preserve or restore film.
Digital technologies have changed that. It is now possible to preserve and offer access to all sorts of knowledge. Digital technologies give new life to copyrighted material after it passes out of its commercial life.
And now copyright law does get in the way. Every step of producing this digital archive of our culture infringes on the exclusive right of copyright. To digitize a book is to copy it. To do that requires permission of the copyright owner. The same holds for music, film, and every other artifact of our culture protected by copyright. The effort to make these things available to history, or to researchers, or to those who just want to explore is now inhibited by a set of rules that were written for a radically different context.
This is what the 50 year maintenance fee we've proposed is all about-- It will allow digital technology users to cheaply get permission to use older works from creators, and to use works creators no longer choose to protect to make our culture available to our future.
March 2, 2004
