It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). This system also ensured that, when the work’s copyright expired, you could tell from any copy that this was so—by simply adding the duration of copyright to the date printed in the work’s copyright notice. The Berne Convention, however, changed all that by replacing the assumption of freedom with the assumption of monopoly, and it now takes extensive research to be sure a work is public domain.

Candidates for a unified theory justifying copyright in all its manifestations include the value of the copyright owner’s efforts in creating the work. This value can take a natural rights form – the value of genius – but it can also take the more mundane Lockean agricultural form – copyright owners are the sowers of their intellectual labor.

"Last week, after months of work, EFF launched Teaching Copyright, a balanced, fact-based curriculum for high school educators looking to discuss copyright issues in the classroom.

Glyn Moody now points us to the news that (Russian President) Medvedev appears to be going even further than just condemning today's copyright laws. He's now looking to adjust Russia's copyright laws in the other direction.

"...The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright powers, while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright to promote progress, for the benefit of the public then we must make changes in the other direction..."

"...The GNU Free Documentation License is a clever piece of work: rather than using copyright law to prohibit you from using works released under it, it uses copyright law to guarantee that you will always be free to use, modify, redistribute and study works released under it.

GNU GPL actually *depends* on copyright, an intellectual monopoly, in order to spread intellectual freedom. Moreover, it seems to doom free software into a kind of symbiosis with copyright, forcing it to remain a supporter of that monopoly, since without it, the approach used to make the GPL so powerful would not work.

[…] this does result in the paradoxical situation that the GNU GPL actually *depends* on copyright, an intellectual monopoly, in order to spread intellectual freedom. Moreover, it seems to doom free software into a kind of symbiosis with copyright, forcing it to remain a supporter of that monopoly, since without it, the approach used to make the GPL so powerful would not work.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) alleges that Cisco, famous for making equipment used to route data around the Internet, has infringed on the FSF’s copyright in numerous programs used in their Internet routing equipment marketed under the Linksys brand [...] It’s important to note some differences between how the FSF handles copyright infringement and what the FSF does in their everyday work