Public domain, this term has confused many people. What it means is that any material that is declared by its author to be in the public domain may be copied or used in any way that the person copying it desires. Another way that material gets into the public domain is, because it is very old and the copyright on it has not been renewed. Then there is works that are created by government employees for the government. These are usually in the public domain. It used to be that if something didn't have a copyright notice, that the work automatically fell into the public domain and anyone could use it. That was changed by law and now if something doesn't contain this notice, that does not mean that the material is in the public domain. Using material that someone stated is in the public domain for you own purposes, can be risky. Just because a party states that something is in the public domain, doesn't necessarily mean that it is. They could be mistaken, or vindictive. If the author of a work claims that it is in the public domain, than it is. If a third party states that something is in the public domain, it may not be. One of the things that really surprised me, when I first started looking into this, was the amount of movies that fell into the public domain, in the old days, before the law was passed that stated you didn't need a copyright notice anymore for something to be protected under the copyright law. It seems that every once in a while, people forgot to put the copyright notice on a movie and it became public domain by default. I wouldn't have wanted to have been the person responsible for forgetting that.

I used to have quite a collection of public domain Hollywood movies on this site. If you have been coming here for awhile, you might remember that. I think I had about a hundred and twenty available for download, at one time. They took up far too much space on my site, for the amount of activity that they generated, so I removed them after a couple of months. I figured that this was enough time for anyone that wanted to download these moves. For those of you that feel that after reading this, you have missed out on this, all you have to do is go to the Google search engine and type in public domain movies and many sites that have them will be listed and you can go to one of these sites and download to your heart's content. Another device, for lack of a better word, that closely resembles public domain, but is just a little different is Creative Commons. The work created under Creative Commons requires you to list the appropriate license. There may also be some restriction on it's use that you have to abide by. Most of the works that I have come across under Creative Commons have allowed me to do anything I wanted to with the work, as long as I specified the license, so that others might know that they could do the same. If derivative works are created from Creative Commons material, they usually must also fall into the same restrictions. I find that Creative Commons sometimes offers a way to get hard to find photographs that I can use to display during an article.

I have talked about this stuff before and it still amazes me that people could actually forget to copyright a movie. You would think that someone would be assigned to at least double check that before the movie was released. The fact that the copyright notice was forgotten happened in some very big movies of yesteryear. Even today many of us remember Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. A film with these two in it must have cost a fortune, yet Charade, a very famous movie of it's time, was not copyrighted. The movie came out in 1963. The movie was described as, "Romance and suspense in Paris, as a woman is pursued by several men who want a fortune her murdered husband had stolen. Who can she trust?" It was so good that it was nominated for an Oscar. Hepburn won the BAFTA award for her performance. It was nominated for the Golden Globe award and received countless other awards. Is this the kind of movie that you want to forget to copyright? I would love to know what forgetting to copyright this movie cost the company in real dollars?

Can you image if the copyright law was still in effect where you had to have a copyright notice and someone forgot to copyright a hollywood movie. There would be copies of it for sale on every street corner in every large city in this country within a day or two. Fortunately for people in the past, there were no VCRs or DVD players, so I suspect that there was minimal damage. Perhaps a theater or two would show this movie after purchasing a copy from somewhere. This way they wouldn't have to pay the "movie rent", as I like to call it. I think that most movie houses in that day wouldn't dare to do this though, they would have been afraid of being cut off from feature films from that particular company. Hey maybe forgetting the copyright wasn't that bad after all?

Walt Disney Company had a big problem that was going to rear it's ugly head in 2003. The patent on Mickey Mouse and other characters was set to expire and was not able to be renewed again under the then current law. What were they to do? There must have been hundreds of companies all around the world, just waiting for this to happen so that they could hijack that particular mouse character. Some of the other characters that the copyright was going to expire on were Pluto, Goofy and even Donald Duck. A group of interested parties came forward and petitioned the Congress of the United States to pass an extension bill to protect Disney. Disney had been a generous contributor of campaign cash and perhaps this helped them get the extension. An extension was passed and President Clinton signed it. The bill is known as the Sonny Bono copyright Term Extension Act. I have a little different take on what happened, but it is only my opinion. The companies that asked congress for the extension were movie companies, record companies and such. Maybe they figured that an extension might help them also? Who knows? Anyway I am glad that Disney succeeded, even though they are strictly a profit making company that was seeking help beyond what any other company had ever received with copyright problems, it would have been a shame to lose good old Donald and Mickey and I am sure most of us feel the same way.

The premise of copyrights is truly needed, otherwise all our intellectual property would be stolen. Even with copyright protection there is a booming business that involves violating copyrights. Just look around you. If you live in a big city, such as New York, you will see copyrights being violated every day. Just go outside and on many different street corners there are people selling DVD of movies that are still in the theatres. How can this be? It happens at least two different ways and maybe more. The first way is that someone brings a video camera into a theatre and videos a movie, while it is playing, which produces a bad looking movie. I have seen one or two of these in people's homes. I remember seeing one and not knowing why the quality was so bad and then it happened. All of a sudden, you could see someone stand up in front of the camera and walk out of the aisle. It was hysterical. I couldn't help but laugh, because at that moment I realized what was going on. The second way these movies get out so fast, is that someone steals a master disk and copies it. Many times these disks will flash words on the screen while you are watching the movie. They usually say something like "This movie is not for public viewing", or something like that. The movie industry needs to get better control of these preview disks.

Counterfeit Fashions Are A Big Problem
Photo Source: Stock.xching

Copyright violation is not the only violation going on. Patent violation is also rampant. It doesn't take much work to find knock offs of famous brands everywhere. I know that I am constantly bombarded in my email, with offers to buy this junk. You can find pseudo Rolex watches everywhere. It has gotten so bad that there are probably far more phony Rolex watches out there than real ones. I remember when some of the stores were having a problem with counterfeit jeans. People would buy the counterfeit jeans and then bring them back to big department stores that would allow exchanges if you didn't have your sales slip. Here is how that worked. People would buy a pair of counterfeit jeans for about twelve dollars and then bring them back and get credit for forty or fifty dollars. The stores soon put a stop to that, but not before a lot of people chiseled them.