Yesterday was Public Domain Day in the United States and in many other nations around the world. The first day of every year creative works that have outlived their legal copyrights enter the public domain and become freely available for all to use. Sounds great right, but the labyrinthine system of copyright law in the U.S. has drastically limited the number of works entering public domain and has made it increasingly difficult for the unlawyered to understand copyright regulations.
This very helpful infographic (see below) developed by NeoMam Studios may explain the murky rules and clarify the opaque system.You can also learn more about it all here and at the fantastic website Public Domain Review. And if you’re really into this stuff, you can download a free copy of Tales From the Public Domain: Bound By Law, a great comic book about the convoluted system in the U.S..
Filed under: Architecture, Art, Books, ebooks, Film, Libraries, movies, Music, Photography, USA, Writing Tagged: Copyright, Law, Public Domain
