public domain

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Public Domain

Land that is owned by the United States. In Copyright law, literary or creative works over which the creator no longer has an exclusive right to restrict, or receive a royalty for, their reproduction or use but which can be freely copied by the public.

Cross-references

Public Lands.

public domain

n. 1) in copyright law, the right of anyone to use literature, music or other previously copyrighted materials, after the copyright period has expired. Although the copyright laws have changed several times, a rule of thumb would be that the last possible date for copyright protection would be 50 years after the death of the author. Thus, the works of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Jack London, and other classic writers are in the public domain and may be published by anyone without payment of a royalty. 2) all lands and waters owned by federal, state and local governments. (See: copyright)

public domain

noun available for use by the public, creative work freely usable, dominion to use, free to all, freely used by the community, invention freely usable, logo freely usable, not private, open for the community, permitted, publicly accessible, publicly obtainable, publicly usable, unreserved, unrestricted, within the province of the public
Associated concepts: patents, promietary rights

public domain

1 (US) land owned by the government.

2 property rights not attached by anyone. In the UK so far as heritable or real property is concerned, almost anything that is not owned by someone is owned by the Crown or inherited by the Crown. The main practical use of the phrase in contemporary.

References in periodicals archive ?

In raising this critique, this scholarship implies egalitarian public domains where patterns of discrimination are exposed in order to facilitate women's access to patent rights.

Thus, I suggest an analytic for understanding the public domain as situated public domains.

An understanding of public domains as situated enables scholars to consider how various conceptions of the public domain are at work within particular patent law struggles and critical IP projects.

Situating feminism, patent law, and the public domain

Other conceptions of public domains seem to have been born out of dissatisfaction with the "traditional, absolutist conception of the public domain" (that is, information resources unencumbered by intellectual property rights).

Six public domains focus on freedoms to use information resources even when works embodying these resources are protected by intellectual property rights.

Their public domains (PD 7 and 8) would, respectively, grant artists a status presumptively entitling them to appropriate from others' works and provide a cultural landscape from which creators would be free to draw whatever inspired them to engage in artistic self-expression.

Enriching discourse on public domains

An explicit reservation of the public domain in these circumstances must be seen as a part of the court's obligation to be clear about the hold~g.

Professor Samuels and some others have suggested that no matter how we may struggle, in the end the public domain is whatever intellectual property is not.

Meanwhile, the public domain certainly can and should be envisioned as a thing apart, and strengthened accordingly.

Reimagining the public domain

Because I will argue that materials in the public domain are not owned by anybody, I think that this is a mistake.

Earlier we saw that Patricia Samuelson wrongly subsumed a privately created commons within the public domain, and similarly others wrongly subsume public property within the public domain.

The main categories of the material public domain were already well known to Roman law, which catalogued res nullius and res communes among the nonexclusive forms of property.

Common property redux

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