the public domain

This page deals with the public domain - ownership by everyone and no one - into which works pass because the period of protection has ceased or because they have a special status, for example US government publications. It also points to resources for identifying whether a work is in copyright, for example the WATCH database.

     coverage

Works enter the public domain in two ways.

They become common property when the period of protection expires.

Or restrictions on copying and distribution have never been made, for example in publications of the US government.

     repackaged content

As preceding pages and the Intellectual Property guide have suggested, the copyright regimes in Australia and overseas provide some protection for the 'repackaging' of public domain content.

The extent of that protection and its duration varies considerably from regime to regime. A straight facsimile of a public domain book would generally not gain copyright protection for the publisher or photographer. However, there would be protection for editorial apparatus such as footnotes, an introduction, choice of words and even typographic layout - all of which might be regarded as expressions of creativity. While William Shakespeare, for example, is long dead and his writing is in the public domain, editors and publishers enjoy some protection for their editions of Much Ado About Nothing and other works.

US courts have been reluctant to provide extensive copyright protection for photographic reproductions of public domain images.

The New York court decision in the Bridgeman v Corel case, for example, involved claims that Canadian software company Corel had breached the copyright of The Bridgeman Art Library (a UK British company that licenses transparencies of public domain artwork owned by museums) by including those 'Bridgeman's' images on a Corel CD. The court disagreed, endorsing Corel's claim that Bridgeman had no copyright to the individual images because thosed images were in the public domain and Bridgeman's transparencies lacked the original authorship required by US copyright law. That decision has, however, been criticised in the UK, particularly by museums, and caution is desirable.

     resources

Because there's no global registration scheme for copyright and metadata-based intellectual property rights management schemes such as DOI have only very limited coverage it's often very difficult to quickly

• identify who created a text, image or other item of intellectual property
  
• determine whether that person or organisation is the copyright owner
  
• identify whether the work is still protected by copyright, for example is the person still alive
  
• gain permission for use of the work

We'll shortly be highlighting some resources of value in identifying creators and the copyright status of works.

One example is the WATCH (Writers, Artists & Their Copyright Holders) database, a US-UK project that provides information about English-language literary figures (including some Australians) and their estates.




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