Public Domain and Public Space:

Copyright Law and Intellectual Property

• U.S. Copyright Office See especially the Copyright Basics page and searchable lists of recent NIEs (Notices of Intent to Enforce).
• Title 17, the official U.S. copyright code, as it currently stands.
• Association of Research Libraries History of Copyright page.
• When Works Pass into the Public Domain, in handy table format. Last updated 10/9/1999.
• The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (AKA the Fairness in Music Licensing Act) and its Senate equivalent, the Hatch-sponsored Copyright Term Extension Act of 1997, when enacted, endured that virtually nothing will enter the public domain for the next twenty years. See also the Copyright Amendments Act of 1992, which changed the rules on automatic copyright renewal.
• Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (from 1995)
• The Copyright Website includes multimedia examples and simple explanations of tricky copyright issues.
• Opposing Copyright Extension site offers some direct criticism of the recent changes to copyright law.
• The Berkman Center's Openlaw site, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, includes commentary and documentation for one case challenging the Sonny Bono Act (Eldred v. Reno) and two cases concerning digital content, DeCSS, and DVD technology.

Public Domain Materials

• Howard Besser's Talk on Public Domain & Public Space, NINCH Town Hall Meeting, Visual Resources Association,

       April 5, 2000
• Public Domain Music Reference site, researched and maintained by a non-lawyer, with extensive resources music in the public domain.
• Subverted Public Domain List A partial listing of works that entered public domain by 1998, and ones which would have entered public domain in 1999 if not for the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
• Copyright's Commons, a coalition devoted to promoting a vibrant public domain.
• Mickey Mouse and the Public Domain
• Norman Solomon's story on Mickey Mouse and the public domain, from the website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
• Lauren Vanpelt, an Arizona State University law student, argues convincingly that Mickey may be in the public domain after all. Read her paper Mickey Mouse: A Truly Public Character.
• Chicago Tribune story from October, 1998 on Disney's lobbying efforts
• Washington Post article from October, 1998: Mouse Droppings

Public Spaces

• News from the Micropower and Pirate Radio Movement Part of the anarchist offerings on the Mid-Atlantic Infoshop, this page features a listing of key stories and other media coverage on pirate radio.
• Mother Jones featured a recent piece on pirate radio in Colorado
• The Green Guerillas, a group devoted to strengthening New York neighborhoods through the creation of community gardens, was a major figurant in the Esperanza Gardens battle from early 2000
• Village Voice: November 1999 article on the impending destruction of the Esperanza Community Garden in New York. The garden was eventually bulldozed to make way for a high-rise, depsite protests and sit-ins that resulted in 31 arrests in mid-February. Protesters gathered again in early March 2000
• The Trust for Public Land is a national nonprofit promoting the creation of parks and public spaces, and emphasizing the importance of public space as a national resource.
• RTMARK works with its public "shareholders" on projects to reclaim public space and force big companies to stop being bullies when it comes to domain names (some--well, most--of their projects involve corporate sabotage and internet terrorism)
• Snowden Becker's March 2000 pictures of public spaces
• Privacy
• The Surveillance Camera Players An anarchist theater group, based in New York, which aims to raise citizen consciousness of the prevalence of security cameras in a community where crime rates are on the downswing. (From their site: "Only someone completely distrustful of all government would be opposed to what we are doing with surveillance cameras." -- NYC Police Commissioner Howard Safir, 27 July 1999. "The Surveillance Camera Players: completely distrustful of all government.")
• NYC Surveillance Camera Project documents the encroachment of the government eye on public/private space, in part by attempting to list the locations of all surveillance cameras in New York City.
• The Surveillance Camera Players were featured in Details and the New York Daily News in 1999.
• The Village Voice ran a three-part series on surveillance cameras in New YorkÑit starts here
• Reprinted story about security cameras in Great Britain, the world's most surveilled country, from the London Times.
• Cameras are even showing up in restaurants, where they're combined with in-house computer systems to destroy dinersÍ privacy.

Fair Use

• Against Intellectual Property A wide-ranging collection of resources and news about intellectual property issues. Their editorial slant is obvious from their name, but they do provide thorough coverage of current media from their perspective.
• The Negativland Intellectual Property Issues page, from the folks who made fair use cool. Lots of ideas about challenging the current definition of intellectual property, public domain, etc. Great resources on copyright, with particular emphasis on music and broadcasting.
• Musicians Against the Copyrighting of Samples home page

• Negativland & the RIAA Archive of media coverage related to a lawsuit that helped put fair use on the map in the 1990s.
• Negativland members also took part in a Mondo 2000 interview with The Edge, from U2, whose record label sued for copyright infringement.

last updated 4/4/00