Welcome to Professor Lemley’s Home for Wayward Works. Formerly known as the Asylum for Orphan Works, but we really prefer not to use the O-word as this connotes a state of abandonment and a feeling of being unwanted. Although we are certainly happy that the term Bastard Works was retired after 1912. At PLHWW, we believe that every work deserves ...
(Originally published at Copyright Alliance as part its “Secret History of Copyright” series of blogs.) “Students of the nineteenth-century drama come sooner or later to the realization that the most important dramatist of the period was Shakespeare.” – Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly (1956) – Most people are probably familiar with the word hack as a pejorative for ...
Picking up on one of the big copyright themes of the month—the re-opened public domain*—scholars James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins were hosted last week by Joshua Johnson on his show 1A, produced by public radio station WAMU in Washington, D.C. Boyle and Jenkins are leading members of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University Law, ...
Should auld creative works be forgot,And never brought to mind? There may be any number of reasons to feel anxious about the coming year, but at least we can take comfort in the fact that the song “Yes! We Have No Bananas” will be entering the public domain. Sure, this may seem like clinging to a bit of floating timber ...
Photo by Tamagocha A couple weeks ago, a comment on the Illusion of More Facebook page proposed that the Walt Disney Company was able to get its start in the 1930s because the story for the studio’s first animated feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was “in the public domain.” I don’t mean to pick on one particular comment ...
