Copyright and the public domain: an introduction

Module 1: copyright and the public domain

Learning objective

This module explores the basic concepts of copyright law. It provides a general introduction to the elements of copyright important to librarians. Other modules will discuss these topics in detail.

Case study

“I want to build a course pack for my students. What material may I include?”

Angela, a music professor, is visiting her school’s library to collect material to build a course pack for her students. She would like to include excerpts from books, electronic resources and music scores. She also wants to post selected music and video clips online with her commentary. Nadia, the librarian, will explain to Angela what she may and may not do under copyright law.

Lesson

What is copyright?

As we saw in the Introduction, there are several views concerning the purposes of copyright law. One view is that copyright law encourages creativity by allowing creators to profit from their work. This goal of copyright is reflected in the wording of many copyright laws. For example, the "Copyright Clause" of the United States Constitution states that Congress may grant authors copyright protection for their works for a limited time in order to "promote the progress of science and useful arts." (US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.) Similarly, the stated purpose of the Statute of Anne , the first copyright statute in England, was to "encourage learning." (8 Anne Chapter 19 (1710).) Another view is that copyright law ensures that authors are paid fairly for their effort. A third view is that a creative work is an expression of the personality of its creator, and thus should be protected from being used without the creator's permission.

Although copyright law grants authors many rights in their works, it also limits these rights in many important ways. Most of these limitations are quite specific, but a few are broad. Several, as we will see, enable librarians to use or disseminate copyrighted materials more freely than they otherwise could.

What is the public domain?

As an illustration, suppose the fictional country of Booktonia has a copyright term of 20 years. If a book was written in 1980, the copyright protection for the book in Booktonia would have ended 20 years later, in 2000. Once the copyright in a work expires, the work is said to "fall into" the public domain. Once a work is in the public domain, the restrictions of copyright law no longer apply, and anyone may copy, reuse, or share the work as they wish.

The public domain functions as a pool of creative material from which anyone may draw. It provides authors the raw materials from which the next generation of books, movies, songs, and knowledge can be built. As the 14th century English poet Chaucer (whose work is now in the public domain) wrote , "For out of the old fields, as men say, Comes all this new corn, from year to year; And out of old books, in good faith, Comes all this new science that men learn."