Duration & the Public Domain

Chapter 2 · Duration & the Public Domain

Chapter 1 established that copyright attaches automatically and lasts a while — but "a while" isn't forever. This chapter covers exactly how long protection lasts, and what happens to a work once it runs out: the public domain, a genuinely different legal state from anything covered so far, where a work can be used by anyone, for any purpose, with no permission needed at all.

How Long Copyright Actually Lasts

Duration depends on who created the work and under what circumstances. In the U.S. (this course's primary focus, per its own closing scope note), the modern standard for an individually-authored work is the life of the author plus 70 years. Works made for hire, and anonymous or pseudonymous works, follow a different rule entirely, since there's no individual author's lifespan to measure from.

Type of work	Duration
Individually authored, created 1978 or later	Life of the author + 70 years
Work made for hire, anonymous, or pseudonymous	95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation — whichever is shorter
Older, pre-1978 works	Governed by a more complex, since-superseded set of rules — genuinely more involved than this course's own general-literacy scope covers in depth

Terms have been extended before, more than once

Copyright term length isn't fixed forever — U.S. law has extended it multiple times over the past century, most notably in 1976 and again in 1998. Nothing about the current numbers in this chapter's own table should be treated as permanently fixed either; duration is a matter of current statute, not an unchangeable constant.

The Public Domain — A Genuinely Different Legal State

Once copyright expires, a work enters the public domain: it has no copyright protection at all, and can be copied, adapted, sold, performed, or built upon by anyone, for any purpose, without asking permission or paying anyone. This is not the same as having a very permissive license — a public domain work has no copyright owner left to grant or withhold permission from in the first place.

Real, current public domain examples

Works published in the U.S. before 1929 are, at the time of writing, definitively in the public domain. Copyright term expiration is an ongoing, rolling process, not a one-time event — each new year, on January 1st (informally nicknamed "Public Domain Day" by copyright commentators), another year's worth of works crosses that same threshold as their own term finally runs out.

How Else a Work Can Enter the Public Domain

Term expiration is the most common path, but not the only one:

Government works — per Chapter 1, U.S. federal government works are generally excluded from copyright from the moment they're created, entering the public domain immediately rather than after a term expires
Voluntary dedication — a copyright holder can deliberately place their own work into the public domain before any term would naturally expire, most commonly today via a formal tool like the CC0 public domain dedication (covered properly, and kept clearly distinct from an ordinary Creative Commons license, in Chapter 6)
Historical failure to renew — under an older U.S. system (no longer in effect for new works), copyright required an affirmative renewal at a fixed point, and works whose owners simply failed to file that renewal fell into the public domain as a result — mostly a historical curiosity for older works today, not a live mechanism for new ones

"Old" and "public domain" aren't automatically the same thing

A well-known real example: most of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories fell into the public domain decades ago — but a handful of his very last stories, published in the 1920s, remained separately protected for years afterward under their own, later term. A 2014 U.S. court case (Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate) directly addressed this: character traits and story elements that only first appeared in those still-protected final stories could not be freely used, even though the character and the bulk of the stories were otherwise long since public domain. A single well-known character can, in practice, be partially public domain and partially still protected at the same time, depending on which specific work a given detail actually came from.

Public Domain vs. Creative Commons — Not the Same Mechanism

This chapter deliberately does not cover Creative Commons licensing — that's Chapter 6's own material, and the two are kept separate on purpose, because they are genuinely different legal mechanisms, not two names for the same thing.

Public domain (this chapter)	Creative Commons license (Chapter 6)
No copyright exists on the work at all	Copyright still exists — the holder is voluntarily granting some specific permissions while keeping others
No conditions of any kind — no attribution required, no restrictions	Conditions typically attached (most commonly, at minimum, requiring attribution to the original creator)
No one can ever "revoke" public domain status once term expiration or dedication has occurred	Governed by the specific terms of the license chosen, which vary by license type

Hands-On Exercises

Exercise 1

A corporate training video was produced as a work made for hire in 1990 and never publicly released until 2010. Explain, using this chapter's own table, how its copyright term would be calculated.

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Exercise 2

Explain why the Sherlock Holmes example shows that "this character is old, so it must all be public domain" is an oversimplification, using the specific legal mechanism this chapter describes.

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Exercise 3

A friend says a Creative Commons Attribution license and the public domain are "basically the same thing, since both let you use the work for free." Explain what's genuinely different between the two.

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Chapter 2 Quick Reference

Individually authored works (created 1978+): life of the author + 70 years
Works made for hire / anonymous / pseudonymous: 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter
Copyright terms have been extended by statute before — the current numbers aren't permanently fixed
The public domain means no copyright exists at all — usable by anyone, for any purpose, with no permission needed
A work can reach the public domain via term expiration, government-work status, voluntary dedication (e.g. CC0), or historical non-renewal
Public domain and Creative Commons licensing are genuinely different mechanisms — one has no copyright at all, the other is copyright still in force with some permissions granted
Next chapter: Exclusive Rights & Infringement