This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This exhibit is meant to provide legal information, not legal advice.
The Public Domain
Works registered or first authorized to be published in the United States in the public domain are not protected by copyright. Works in the public domain, without restriction, can: be reused and reproduced in print or digital form, have derivative works created from them, be performed publicly, be publicly displayed, and be used for commercial purposes.i
Nosferatu is in the public domain. It is for this reason that Nosferatu appeared in SpongeBob SquarePants!
Under current copyright law, original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression are protected. Works can, however, be made available for public use for a number of reasons! Works in the public domain include:
Works created by the Federal Governmentii
This includes scientific data, photographs, and other useful information. Not everything created by the U.S. government falls under the public domain, but many works do! These works may be noted as “Public Domain” or, under “Copyright Restriction: None”. An example is this image of howling wolves, taken from a government site.
Works that failed to comply with formalities of law:
A great example of this is Night of the Living Dead. The film was originally titled Night of the Flesh Eaters, but after court battle against representatives of the film The Flesh Eaters, the title was changed. Unfortunately “We had put our title copyright notice, the C with the circle around it, on the titles. We should have out the copyright notice at the end of the film, which is where it belongs.”iii This formality is no longer needed to claim a copyright on a work, and a colorized, restored version of Night of the Living Dead is under copyright.
Works published before 1925iv
Works published before 1925 have now entered the public domain because their copyright has expired. This includes Nosferatu and The Great Gatsby 2019 was the first year since 1998 for this to happen!
Sources:
iU.S. Government Works. (2021). Retrieved from https://www.usa.gov/government-works
iiUniversity of Illinois Main Library. (2020, Sep 24). Copyright Reference Guide: Public Domain. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved from: https://guides.library.illinois.edu/copyrightreferenceguide/publicdomain
iiiKane, Joe. (2010). Night of the Living Dead: Behind the Scenes of the Most Terrifying Zombie Movie Ever. New York: Citadel Press Books.
ivCornell University Library Copyright Information Center. (2021). Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States. Retrieved from: https://copyright.cornell.edu/publicdomain