Fair Use – Public Domain

Your student is asking great questions! Not all of the digitized historical objects found in the Internet Archive (and all over the internet really) are in the public domain, so it’s a good idea to check. 

 

The way I check is usually with the help of the Cornell Public Domain Chart (created by Peter Hirtle). This chart walks you through the major factors that go into determining whether something is in copyright or in the public domain. Here’s how I would go about checking:

• I know that Put Your Head on my Shoulder by Paul Anka was first recorded in 1958/1959. I would scroll to the chart section with the red title “Works Registered or First Published in the US.” Each section is organized by date of publication. (I’m going to make an assumption that the video was also created 1958/1959; if it wasn’t, you might need to consider copyright in the underlying song, and copyright in the video recording itself).
• I would look in the “Date of Publication” column at the left, and scroll down to the 3 rows that encompass the 1958 time period, “1925-1977,” and “1925-1963.”
• In the next column over for those rows, I can see that, for that time period, it was required for works to be published with “notice” (which refers to a note showing that the work was copyrighted), and the copyright needed to be renewed in order to stay protected for a longer period of time. I can’t truly see from the Internet Archive page whether or not the recording was published “with notice” or not, but I can look to see if there’s a record of copyright registration and renewal in the Copyright Office’s catalog of copyright registrations & renewals.
• From searching the Copyright Office’s catalog, I see that the copyright was registered in 1959 and renewed in 1986. 
• So going back into the chart, I choose the row that has “1925-1963” for date of publication, and “published with notice and copyright was renewed” in the next row over. I see at the end of this row that things in this category become public domain 95 years after the publication date; for Put Your Head on my Shoulder, that will be in 2054.

I hope that this helps. 

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