The Wikimedia Foundation's legal team recently authored a guest blog post for EFF's Copyright Week [1] about how Wikipedia relies on the public domain (post is also copied below): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/wikipedia-shows-value-vibrant-public-d...

The legal team invited the advocacy advisers list ( advocacy_advisors@lists.wikimedia.org) [2] to comment on a draft [3] that posted on meta and got lots of helpful input from community members.

We're happy to share this with colleagues throughout the Wikimedia movement.

[1] https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/advocacy_advisors [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Blog/Drafts/Wikipedia_Shows_the_Va...

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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/wikipedia-shows-value-vibrant-public-d...

JANUARY 14, 2014 | BY STEPHEN LAPORTE AND YANA WELINDER *Wikipedia Shows the Value of a Vibrant Public Domain*

https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek*In the week leading up the two-year anniversary of the SOPA blackout protests, EFF and others are talking about key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day, we'll take on a different piece, exploring what’s at stake and and what we need to do to make sure the law promotes creativity and innovation. We've put together a page where you can read and endorse the principles yourself https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek. Let's send a message to DC, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and wherever else folks are making new copyright rules: We're from the Internet, and we're here to help.*

*This is a guest post from Yana Welinder https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:YWelinder_(WMF) and Stephen LaPorte https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Slaporte_(WMF), Legal Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. If you have comments on this post, you can contact Yana https://twitter.com/yanatweets and Stephen https://twitter.com/sklaporte on Twitter.*

While more commonly known as New Year’s Day, January 1 was also International Public Domain Dayhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Day. It’s the day when some creative works enter the public domain, which is the collective wealth of works that are not covered by copyright. Public domain works can be freely published, performed, remixed, translated and otherwise shared with the world. They can also be used to write and illustrate the largest online encyclopedia—Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/. In relying on the public domain to provide free knowledge to millions of people around the world, Wikipedia illustrates the need for a growing body of freely-reusable works. Today, there is concern that ever fewer works will enter the public domain because of lawshttps://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday and international agreementshttp://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6999/125/extending copyright terms across the world. While January 1, 2014 saw many new works enter the public domainhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_public_domain#Entering_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States in countries with shorter copyright terms, those works are still under copyright in the United States as a result of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act, which increased the term from life of the author plus 50 years to life plus 70 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shakespeare.jpgWhether they realize it or not, people rely on the public domain everyday. Millions of peoplehttp://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ use Wikipedia every day to research, check facts, browse aimlessly and evenplay games http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wiki%20Golf. Wikipedia is a collaborative project with hundreds of thousands of authors, and it relies upon a rich public domain to draw from. Some Wikipedia articles are built on text from older public domain encyclopediashttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Reference_works_in_the_public_domain. Other articles may be illustrated by public domain mediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Author_died_more_than_100_years_ago_public_domain_files. For example, when “The Great Gatsbyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby_(2013_film)” hit theatres last year, many people turned to Wikipedia to read about the original novel. There https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby, through public domain photographs, they could discover the New York mansions that inspired the story, such as Beacon Towershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Beacon_Towers_from_the_beach_1920.jpg—a house that has since been demolished. Similarly, when Wikipedia readers are researching Shakespeare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare, they are able to view a public domain image of his portraithttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shakespeare.jpg from 1610 (pictured). Because both of these images are in the public domain, readers can download and reuse them in other works, like Wikipedia articles.

Most images featured in Wikipedia articles are hosted on Wikimedia Commonshttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, which is a repository of free media that is also used by newspapers, magazines and other websiteshttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Published. Wikimedia Commons catalogs a wealth of historical works that have entered the public domain. But it also hosts works that have not had their copyright expire. All material created in past 70 years, which includes most in-color photographs, have been uploaded by creators who proactively give up some of their exclusive rights in order to contribute to this collection of reusable media. Their contributions rely on free licenseshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_licensing developed by the free culture movement to establish a landscape of public domain-like material. One example is Creative Commons Zerohttp://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/, a sort of copyright waiver that content creators can affix to their works to disclaim all copyright protection attached to them, effectively contributing the works to the public domain. Another example is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA)http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/license, which requires re-users to re-license their derivatives under the same free license as the original work and attribute the original creator, but otherwise allows free use of the work as if it were in the public domain. Most material on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY-SA.

We must defend a vibrant public domain http://publicdomainreview.org/ if we want collaborative projects like Wikipedia to continue to thrive. When material is removed from the public domain, it damages projects like Wikipedia and impacts Wikipedia readers and reusers at large. We are disappointed in the decision in Golan v. Holderhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_v._Holder, which removed content in the public domain by upholding the theUruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay_Round_Agreements_Act 1https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/wikipedia-shows-value-vibrant-public-domain#footnote1_w5rpchk. Given the impact of the URAA on Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation joined EFF http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/22/fighting-for-the-public-domain/ in an amicus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_curiae brief challenging the URAA https://www.eff.org/cases/golan-v-holder a few years ago. When copyright is restored in a work, the public domain suffers. The immediate result is that Wikipedia is not as rich, because removing material from the public domain means that work previously available on Wikipedia may need to be removed.

The Wikipedia community does not take harmful copyright laws lightly. This week also marks the two-year anniversary of the historic moment when Wikipedians decided https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action to black outhttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:History_Wikipedia_English_SOPA_2012_Blackout2.jpg the English Wikipedia site, joining many other sites protestinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA the SOPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act and PIPAhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act bills—anddefeated themhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/business/media/tech-and-media-elite-are-likely-to-debate-piracy.html?_r=0! Wikipedia is a living project that has developed over the past 13 years into a massive collaborative resource used by people around the world. It may be difficult for most of us to imagine a time before so much information was freely available on the internet. The annual celebration of Public Domain Day and the anniversary of SOPA is an opportunity to reflect on how projects like Wikipedia thrive when there is a vibrant public domain and remember that we can stand up to protect the public domain when laws put it in peril.

*Many thanks to the Wikimedia Legal and Community Advocacy team https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Legal for their help in preparing this post and, in particular, Michelle Paulson https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Mpaulson_(WMF), Dashiell Renaud https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:DRenaud_(WMF), Manprit Brar https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:MBrar_(WMF), and Anna Koval https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:AKoval_(WMF). We would also like to thank the Wikimedia community for their helpful comments.*

- 1.https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/wikipedia-shows-value-vibrant-public-domain#footnoteref1_w5rpchkURAA restored copyright in the works of foreign authors that had previously been in the public domain in the U.S. (typically, for failure to meet the former registration and notification formalities in the U.S.).