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# Public domain

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The body of creative works and other knowledge--writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others--in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest (such as copyrights or patents) is called the public domain. Such works are considered part of the public's cultural heritage, and can be used and built upon by anyone without restriction. A creative work becomes part of the public domain in one of several ways:

1. The work is very old, created before copyright and patent laws existed. For example, the plays and poems of Shakespeare, the music of Beethoven, the inventions of Aristotle.
2. The copyright or patent on the work has expired. For example, the works of Mark Twain and the inventions of Thomas Edison.
3. The work is not covered by copyright or patent laws. For example, mathematical formulas and book titles.
4. The author or inventor explicitly disclaims any proprietary interest in the work, granting it to the public domain. For works of authorship, this must be done explicitly because copyright applies automatically to all works. For inventions, patents must be applied for, so failure to secure a patent may place an invention in the public domain.
5. The author or inventor is ineligible for proprietary rights. For example, works created by the US government are placed into the public domain.

Note that there are many works that are not part of the public domain, but for which the owner of some proprietary rights has chosen not to enforce those rights, or to grant some subset of those rights to the public. See, for example, the Free Software Foundation which creates copyrighted (or, using their terminology, "copylefted") software that is licensed without charge to the public for most uses, forbidding only proprietary redistribution. Sometimes such work is mistakenly referred to as "public domain" in colloquial speech.

Note also that while some musical works may be in the public domain, transcriptions or performances of those works may not be. For more details (or for public domain transcriptions of public domain works), visit Mutopia at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/

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Last edited August 5, 2001 7:10 am (diff)
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