EFF: The Public Domain Starts Growing Again Next Year, and It’s About Time
The Public Domain Starts Growing Again Next Year, and It’s About Time We’re taking part in Copyright Week , a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation. Have you ever wondered how it’s possible for there to be two Jungle Book movies to be in development at the same time? Why everything seems to be based on a work by Shakespeare? Or why it always seems like someone is telling a version of The Wizard of Oz ? The answer is that these works are in the public domain, meaning that copyright law no longer prevents other artists from adapting them to create new works. One major rationale for copyright is supposedly that, by giving an exclusive set of rights to artists for their work, we incentivize creativity by making i...