The Disappearing Public Domain:
What is is, what’s happening to it, and why
should we care?
NINCH Town Hall Meeting
VRA San Francisco 4/5/00
Howard Besser
Associate Professor
UCLA School of Education & Information
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/
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The Disappearing Public
Domain• Very short history of Public Spaces and how
they’ve started to disappear
• The erosion of the public domain
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Very short history of Public
Spaces
• The Agora
• The Commons
• Europeans settling America
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Public Spaces are rapidly disappearing
in the late 20th Century-
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Bath bathrooms circa 1650
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Paddington Station
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Public Spaces are rapidly disappearing
in the late 20th Century
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No more privacy in public spacesThe rise of pseudo-public spaces
Broadcasting
The erosion of the public domain-
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Street-cams
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3 blocks of NYC
Map compiled by Matt McCourt and Carl Dahlman, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
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Enemy of the State
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Conversation at Westwood
Farmers Market
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Public Spaces are rapidly disappearing
in the late 20th Century
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No more privacy in public spaces
The rise of pseudo-public spacesBroadcasting
The erosion of the public domain-
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Public Space is no longer public
Private Property. Permission
to pass revocable at any time.
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Beverly Center Mall
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Wisconsin Mall
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Bookstores replace Libraries
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Westwood Farmers Market
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Public Spaces are rapidly disappearing
in the late 20th Century
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•
•
•
No more privacy in public spaces
The rise of pseudo-public spaces
BroadcastingThe erosion of the public domain-
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Static Over Low-Powered Radio
NYT Editorial, 3/31/00
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The erosion of the public
domain• What is it?
• What threatens it?
• Why should we care?
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Constitution, Article 1, Section 8
• The Congress shall have power ...to provide
for the ... general welfare of the United
States To promote the progress of science
and useful arts, by securing for limited
times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their respective writings
and discoveries;
Underlining added
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What is Copyright?
• Copyright is a delicate balance btwn users and
creators, but is supposed to be clearly oriented
towards the public good
• Copyright is NOT an unlimited Economic Right
• Copyright is really a temporary monopoly right
granted to creators in order to fulfill the societal
need to increase creativity
• The Copyright monopoly is temporary, then works
become freely available for all purposes
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What’s part of Public Domain?
Still is
Was
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• Water
• Land
Air
Sunlight
Numbers
God
Ideas & Facts**
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Lawyers defining the Public
Domain
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"things in the public domain can be appropriated by anyone without liability
for infringement" (Black's, 1996)
“the law’s primary safeguard of the raw material that makes authorship
possible” (Litman, 1989)
“a commons that includes those aspects of copyrighted works which copyright
does not protect"” (Litman, 1990)
the converse of property rights in information where the government prohibits
certain uses or communications of information to all people but the owner; the
public domain “is the range of uses privileged to all” (Benkler, 1999)
“the ultimate source of all new works (because nothing is ever wholly new in
and of itself)” (Karjala, 1998)
“copyright’s raison d’etre is to benefit the public by encouraging the
production and dissemination of new copyrighted works” (Kreiss, 1995)
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A simpler description
• resources freely available for all members
of society to do whatever they want with
them
• no permissions or fees required
• no tracking of what you read or use
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Importance of Public Domain
• Common Heritage (philosophical)
• New Knowledge incorporates Old
(progress)
• Derivative Works rely upon pre-existing
Works (creativity)
• Social Commentary (free speech)
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What threatens it?• Term extension
• Returning out-of-copyright works back to
copyright
• Mickey Mouse
• Licensing
• Other forms of Contract Laws
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Time before works enter public
domain
Law
Duration
1709 British
14 years
1790 US
14+14 years
1909 US
28+28 years
1976 US
75 years
1998 US
95 years
1998 US
life+70 years
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Lengthier Copyright Means
Date
Term
Published 1923-63
67 years if renewed
Published 1964-77
28+67 years
Created before 1/1/78
Life+70 years or
-12/31/02 if not published
-12/31/47 if published before end of 2002
whichever is greater
Life+70 years (95/120
years corporate)
Created after 1/1/78
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Works that should have already entered
the Public Domain (but didn't)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: Hot and Cold Blood and Invasion of the Sanctuary
• Zane Grey: Code of the West, Steelhead, Tappan's Burro,The
Vanishing American, and Down into the Desert
• Ben Hecht: Fingers at the Window
• Rudyard Kipling: Independence and London Stone
P.G. Wodehouse: Jeeves, First Aid for Dora Heart of a Goof, Leave It
to Psmith, Magic Plus Fours, No Wedding Bells for Him,The Return
Of Battling Billson, Rollo Podmarsh Comes To, Ukridge Rounds A
Nasty Corner, and Chester Forgets Himself
• Virginia Woolf: Jacob's Room
• Film -- Sherlock Jr.
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Works that should have entered
the Public Domain in the next
few years (but won't)
• Irving Berlin: Blue Skies (2002)
• Harry Woods: When the Red, Red Robin Comes
Bob, Bob Bobbin' Along (2002)
• Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern: Ol' Man
River and Showboat (2003)
• Mickey Mouse (2004)
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Copyrighting Facts:
Proposed Database Extraction legislation
• No requirement that the DB contain any original
content (can copyright facts, government information,
etc., taking these out of the Public Domain)
• DB owner given recourse, even if they didn’t suffer
harm
• Implications on:
– Transformative uses
– Uses other than those intended by the compiler (citation analysis)
– Copyrighting court decisions
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NRC analysis of Coble Bill
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reduce the amount of data that can be obtained, particularly from the private
sector or public-private partnerships, an increasingly important source of data;
increase the cost of obtaining data, particularly from database owners with a
monopoly on the data;
restrict access to data for at least 15 years from the time the data was created;
discourage the transformation of existing databases into new ones, creating
artificial gaps in data availability;
prevent the use of data for purposes other than than which it was collected,
minimizing the scientific and societal value of original data; and
increase restrictions on the use of compilations of all kinds, including works of
authorship (e.g. collection of articles) not normally considered to be
databases”
Linn, 2000
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Economics and Contract Laws
preempting long-standing rights
Moving long-standing common-law or constitutional
rights into the arena of person-to-person business
transactions, where these rights no longer apply
– extending reach beyond “first sale” to control Use
– shrink-wraps eliminating any negotiating power (UCITA)
– shrink-wraps and technological protection don’t allow for fair use
exemptions
– licensing curtailing fair use
– Privacy invasions to prove licensing compliance
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Further commodification of
information
• Dismantlement of the public sphere in
general
• Attempts to turn everything into a
commodity (even things that don’t really
behave like commodities)
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Why does any of this matter?
• Derivative works
• Postmodernism
• Diminishment of exploration and
experimentation
• Public discourse
• Democratic values (anyone can be a
creator)
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The Disappearing Public Domain:
What is is, what’s happening to it, and why
should we care?
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http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Copyright/publicdomain.html
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Copyright/
http://books.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/
http://www.dfc.org
http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~cananian/UCITA/
http://www.badsoftware.com/
Lee Felsenstein, 'The Commons of Information,' Dr. Dobb's Journal,
May 1993
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