Patricia Samuelson, for example, sees Creative Commons Licenses and General Public Licenses as examples of a "Contractually Constructed Information Commons," and categorizes them as belonging within the public domain. (120) She does this even while she acknowledges that these licenses are based upon the private intellectual property rights of the owner who constructs the information commons.
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.
righted works frequently rely on some form of valuable public domain
input (think of Disney's use of public domain stories and
To take advantage of all that digitization has to offer, whether it is still under copyright or lives in the
public domain, it must be combined with the power of global distribution networks that deliver information instantaneously around the world.
That will be the determining factor in assessing whether the character is in the
public domain or not." However, she says if the copyright on the initial work has expired and the character appears in a later work expressed in new and different ways, those traits may be subject to protection.
However, we must ensure that the
public domain remains open.
Public domain and copyrighted music scores are widely available online, both legally and illegally.
often dispute what falls under the
public domain and what remains
20th Century Fox Film Corp., rejected the studio's claims that a video firm which repackaged a World War II documentary series that had fallen into the
public domain violated the Lanham Act--the principal federal statute that spells out what constitutes trademark infringement--even though the video company passed off the project as its own.
Processes for establishing the common law
public domain and public processes
Even if the 1994 law were consistent with Congress' copyright power, it violated the First Amendment, Golan argued, by removing works from the
public domain. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the six-justice majority, rejected both arguments.