Public domain?

Ling asks:

Please explain “public domain”, as in: All LibriVox books are in the public domain.

My comments:

It means those books are free.

Here, public domain addresses copyright, implying that those books are no longer (or never) protected by copyright laws and therefore are available to the general public.

LibriVox, of course, refers to the huge collection of free audio books read by volunteers. Its goal is “to record every book in the public domain” (Librivox.org).

If you have time, therefore, tune in to LibriVox. Take advantage of it, practice especially if you think your listening skills are inadequate. Take advantage, because that’s why LibriVox is there.

Anyways, “public domain” means literally public sphere, i.e. things in the public domain don’t belong to any private person or government. Dictionary.com says “public domain” is an Americanism and traces its origin to 1825-35.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, agrees that “public domain refers mostly to land or intellectual property”. Regarding land, Wikipedia says:

Public domain is a term used to describe lands that were not under private or state ownership during the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States, as the country was expanding. These lands were obtained from the 13 original colonies, from Native American tribes, or from purchase from other countries. The domain was controlled by the federal government and sold to state and private interests through the auspices of the General Land Office. For most of the nation’s early history, the government sought to promote settlement of the expanding frontier by selling off the public domain after it had been acquired.

To native Americans, by the way, everything was in the public domain, belonging to one and all, as they had no such notions of private property, land ownership, etc, which are all concepts of the pale face (white people).

“These lands were obtained from the 13 original colonies, from Native American tribes...”. “Forcibly” obtained it was too, as Wikipedia might as well have added.

As regarding intellectual property, Wikipedia traces one of the term’s first uses to France, explaining:

The term public domain did not appear in early copyright law, which was first established in Britain with the Statute of Anne 1709. Though the concept did exist and 18 Century British and French jurists used terms such as publici juris or propriété publique to describe works that were not covered by copyright law.[5] The phrase “fall in the public domain” can be traced to mid 19th Century France to describe the end of copyright term. The French poet Alfred de Vigny equated the expiration of copyright with a work falling “into the sink hole of the public domain”.

In short, what’s in the public domain do not belong to any individual, in contrast to what’s in the private domain, such as one’s home. When you read such a sentence as “she treats her office as her private domain”, you may infer that the boss treats her colleagues rudely, say, shouting at them as though she were at home giving orders to her husband and children. Sounds like many a Chinese mother, I know.

Alright, here are media examples:

1. Why is the Public Domain under threat?

Extending Terms of Copyright Protection

* During the 1990's the world's two largest trading blocs, the European Union (1993) and the United States (1998) extended the term of protection for general copyright by a further 20 years to life plus 70 years.

* Recently certain developing and transition countries have even exceeded these long levels of protection e.g. Mexico (life + 100 years), Côte d'Ivoire (life + 99 years), and Ghana (life + 70 years).

* Furthermore copyright is also now within the realm of free trade agreements (FTAs), which, if with the EU or US, typically require the partner country to extend the copyright term to at least match.

For developing and transition countries, where the issue of accessing information is a key determinant in their development, term extensions mean that information that traditionally belonged to everybody is removed from collective ownership with grave consequences for education and innovation. Furthermore, the extension of the term disproportionately benefits rights owners and their estates in developed nations, at the expense of users of information and potential new creators in developing countries, reflecting the information flows from North to South.

Content in the public domain is shrinking because of these extended terms of protection, resulting in less content for creators to build upon and less content for the benefit of society. Pioneering projects such as that of Eduvision, providing digital learning materials to the poorest children in Kenya, suffer as a result because they must rely on older out-of-copyright and more out-of-date materials which impedes academic research.

- The Public Domain: Why WIPO should care, IFLA.org, March 8, 2007.

2. Behind today’s revelations lie two distinct stories: first, of the Pentagon’s attempts to trace the leaks with painful results for one young soldier; and second, a unique collaboration between the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world’s most powerful nation at war.

The Pentagon was slow to engage. The evidence they have now collected suggests it was last November that somebody working in a high-security facility inside a US military base in Iraq started to copy secret material. On 18 February Wikileaks posted a single document – a classified cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik to Washington, recording the complaints of Icelandic politicians that they were being bullied by the British and Dutch over the collapse of the Icesave bank; and the tart remark of an Icelandic diplomat who described his own president as “unpredictable”. Some Wikileaks workers in Iceland claimed they saw signs that they were being followed after this disclosure.

But the Americans evidently were nowhere nearer to discovering the source when, on 5 April, Assange held a press conference in Washington to reveal US military video of a group of civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters staff, being shot down in the street in 2007 by Apache helicopters: their crew could be heard crowing about their “good shooting” before destroying a van which had come to rescue a wounded man and which turned out to be carrying two children on its front seat.

It was not until late May that the Pentagon finally closed in on a suspect, and that was only after a very strange sequence of events. On 21 May, a Californian computer hacker called Adrian Lamo was contacted by somebody with the online name Bradass87 who started to swap instant messages with him. He was immediately extraordinarily open: “hi... how are you?... I'm an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdad... if you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?”

For five days, Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo. He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, SIPRNET, which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence classified “secret”; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which uses a different security system to carry similar material classified up to “top secret”. He said this had allowed him to see “incredible things, awful things... that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC... almost criminal political backdealings... the non-PR version of world events and crises.”

Bradass87 suggested that “someone I know intimately” had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga’s music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: “I want people to see the truth,” he said.

He dwelled on the abundance of the disclosure: “Its open diplomacy... its Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth... its beautiful and horrifying... It’s public data, it belongs in the public domain.” At one point, Bradass87 caught himself and said: “I can’t believe what im confessing to you.” It was too late. Unknown to him, two days into their exchange, on 23 May, Lamo had contacted the US military. On 25 May he met officers from the Pentagon’s criminal investigations department in a Starbucks and gave them a printout of Bradass87’s online chat.

On 26 May, at US Forward Operating Base Hammer, 25 miles outside Baghdad, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was arrested, shipped across the border to Kuwait and locked up in a military prison.

- Afghanistan war logs: Story behind biggest leak in intelligence history, Guardian.co.uk, July 25, 2010.