Towards an affirmative public domain
Two competing and yet complementary philosophical concepts form the foundation for the legal protection of intellectual property – ‘competing’ in that created works protected by copyright are unavailable for unrestricted use by others as a result of the economic monopoly given to the works’ owners, and ‘complementary’ in that the presumption is that works no longer protected by copyright serve as the basis for the creation of new copyrightable works. These unprotected works comprise the ‘public domain,’ which has never been affirmatively defined. In Golan v. Holder (2012), the US Supreme Court concluded that such a realm is constitutionally unimportant. This research contends, however, that the Court's decision is incorrect, that Golan, federal legislation, and international treaties threaten to bring larger and larger portions of cultural and intellectual content under the control of a property regime that does not understand the contradiction inherent in the notion of absolute property rights in intangible goods. The result is that the public domain is under tremendous pressure from those entities which have the most to gain from expanded authorial rights and from a weakened and less inclusive public domain. Citizens thus will have fewer rights to access and freely use their culture as they choose. The eventual significance of this evolution will be that further creativity and innovation will be stifled, the opposite of the intention of intellectual property law. In this article, we develop an affirmative definition of the public domain, which we believe will correct the imbalance in current intellectual property law.
Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of Determining Copyright Status
It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923 to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This article discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some new steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the public domain. Digital libraries that wish to offer books from this period do so at some risk.
La inseguridad jurídica en normas de contratación estatal
It is established by different studies that the issue of government procurement has been marred by several factors, the test objective to publicize these factors, we take as starting point the constant conflict between the branches of government to try and organize this subject; will collect and analyze diverse regulatory and case material in order to achieve evidence and demonstrate the different concepts of constant change that produces excessive regulation of the subject procurement and is in turn causing rapid changes that result in legal uncertainty for our law on the Contract Status.