Questions & Answers — Copyright Column Column Editor: Will Cross (Director of the Open Knowledge Center and Head of Information Policy, NC State University Libraries) <wmcross@ncsu.edu> ORCID: 0000-0003-1287-1156 QUESTION: An academic publisher asks, “What new works are entering the public domain this year?” ANSWER: After a two-decade hiatus due to the Copyright Term Extension Act, we have had the pleasure of welcoming a new “graduating class” of works into the public domain on January 1 for four years and counting. This year, works first published in 1926 enter the public domain in the United States including A.A. Milne’s classic children’s book Winnie the Pooh, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Dorothy Parker’s debut poetry collection Enough Rope. They are joined by thousands of other works as they graduate from copyright’s monopoly and become available for everyone to read, watch, and build on. In honor of this new class, The Public Domain Review created a Public Domain Advent Calendar highlighting their top picks of what lies in store for 2022. You can see the full calendar and learn more about the latest crop of works here: https://publicdomainreview.org/features/entering-the-publicdomain/2022/. This year the public domain also gains an unusual new set of works due to the Music Modernization Act (MMA). Because sound recordings were not protected at all under the 1909 Copyright Act — only the underlying written scores, scripts, and so forth — early sound recordings were often covered instead by local laws with a variety of terms including some common law protections which never expire! While the copyright term for sound recordings from 1972 and forward was addressed by the Sound Recordings Act of 1971 and the Copyright Act of 1976, earlier recordings remained in this limbo of local laws until the recent passage of the MMA. Under this new law, not only do all pre-1923 sound recordings enter the U.S. public domain in 2022, recordings from 1923 will enter in 2023, those from 1924 in 2024, and so on, up to and including 2046. As a result, the new books, films, and visual artwork discussed above will be joined by recorded songs from Scott Joplin, the first recording of Swing Low Sweet Chariot, and thousands of other sound recordings. You can view a huge selection of these materials on the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress is also celebrating this milestone with the opening of most songs in the National Jukebox (www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/). The Library of Congress will also be supporting the creation of new works that remix and build on these newly-freed materials with the Citizen DJ project (https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/publicdomain-2022/). Check out these sites to explore some amazing new materials that are free for anyone to use beginning in 2022 and share your own remixes with the world. QUESTION: An academic researcher asks, “How can I get access to the written judicial opinions of cases I read about in the news?”
34 Against the Grain / December 2021 - January 2022
ANSWER: Access to the law is a fundamental component of the U.S. legal system and a critical predicate for the rule of law more generally. After all, how can anyone be expected to follow the law — much less work to make it better through the democratic process — if they cannot even read the law? Last year in this column we covered the case of Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. where the Supreme Court considered the copyright status of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (OCGA). In that case, the Supreme Court held that the laws of the state of Georgia, as well as annotations created by a Georgia state entity called the Code Revision Commission, “fall within the government edicts doctrine and are not copyrightable.” This was wonderful news for access to statutory materials, but access to judicial opinions remains a challenge in large part because many opinions are made available to the public primarily through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. While PACER provides an important service in making judicial opinions available online, it is costly and can be challenging to use. As a result, advocates have worked for years to remove the socalled “PACER Paywall.” Media outlets as diverse as the New York Times and Reason have documented the challenges of the system and advocates have filed class-action lawsuits alleging that PACER overcharges users for access. A team from Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and Harvard University’s Berkman Center have also created a tool called RECAP (available at https://free.law/recap) that allows users to automatically search for free copies of documents during a search in PACER. Advocates for access to legal information have also lobbied for federal action to update PACER and remove the paywall. In December of 2021, they had cause to celebrate as the House of Representatives passed the Open Courts Act, marking the first time that a chamber of Congress has voted to eliminate the federal judicial system’s court records paywall. A companion bill has been proposed in the Senate with some critical differences, particularly focused on potential fees for “power users” that accrue many thousands of dollars in fees under the current system. In 2022, Congress will take up this legislation and hopefully pass it into law. Doing so would help assure that everyone — from academic researchers and journalists to pro se litigants and curious library patrons, have more complete and equitable access to the law. QUESTION: A copyright librarian asks, “Are there any tools to help me understand how well people at my institution understand copyright?” ANSWER: Copyright law is central to so much of the work done in higher education, but it often feels like one of the most misunderstood areas as well. In a given day you may speak to an
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