[WikiEN-l] Re: When can an article be considered public domain?

Sat Aug 14 05:47:28 UTC 2004

Robert wrote:

>A few years ago I wrote an article for a local newspaper on
>this issue, and tried to get permission to print the
>article from the ''Task Force on Cults and Missionaries''.
>Despite letters and phone calls, I was unable to track down
>anyone who held copyright to it; the people who sent me the
>article from LA told me that I was free to publish the
>entire article, or parts therein, and that they could not
>provide me with copyright information or the name of the
>author. They allow others to post the entire article on
>their website, notably Rick Ross, an anti-cult educator.
>
>I suspect that the author or authors of this article want
>to avoid being sued, and wish that this material be
>distributed.
>
>I notice that our article on [[Public domain]] states that
>"A copyright holder can explicitly disclaim any proprietary
>interest in the work, effectively granting it to the public
>domain, by providing a licence to this effect. A suitable
>licence will grant permission for all of the acts which are
>restricted by copyright law."
>
>What about cases when we can no longer track down the
>copyright holder, or they wish not to be found, and
>encourage distribution of their work? At what point can we
>reasonably presume that such work enters the public domain?
>
Copyright holders have no obligation to disclose contact information or 
anything else that allows you to track them down. If a copyright holder 
is untraceable, usually all you can do is wait for the copyright to 
expire. This may not be easy to determine, since you probably will not 
know in this situation when the author has died. Under current law, 
among other things, the author needs to have been dead for 70 years. So 
you can't reasonably presume that the work is in the public domain 
unless you're pretty sure that the author died more than 70 years ago.

The possibility that the copyright holder encouraged distribution of the 
work might be construed as some sort of license. But unlike the old 
days, where failure to include a copyright notice might make a work 
public domain, today there is no conduct that puts something into the 
public domain by default. Simply encouraging the distribution of the 
whole work or excerpts is not the kind of explicit statement I would 
read as releasing the work into the public domain.

Furthermore, in the situation you describe, the providers of the content 
act as if they know the author allows redistribution, yet they are 
peculiarly unable to even name the author (which they should be able to 
do even if they have since lost contact). This does not instill any 
great confidence in me that these people can reliably restate the wishes 
of the copyright holder.

In any case, I fail to see the need for us to reprint this work. If it 
provides any useful information that is appropriate for our articles, 
those facts can be written in a suitable NPOV fashion and the source of 
the information cited.

--Michael Snow