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.

"The Gnu General Public Licence (GPL) has been around in one form or another since the Gnu manifesto published by Richard Stallman in 1985. The free software movement founded at that time has not simply created the most successful copyright licence ever, it has acted as a guide to other, similar movements..."

via digitalcitizen => Public Domain Day challenges: what effect does copyright power have on us socially?

http://www.digitalcitizen.info/2008/01/01/public-domain-day-challenges-w...

Last week, the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK sent a threatening letter to a Wikimedia volunteer regarding the upload of public domain paintings to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.

Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet.

"...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 existing copyright system makes a few stars very rich, supports a small fraction of artists adequately, and is an abject failure for the rest. However, it is great for supporting the big business of the copyright industry—and nowadays they are extending it to forbid sharing. It is a system that attacks our freedom so it can waste our money.

" The Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman will speak on 'Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks' at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 4 at Cabrillo College....«Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press,» Stallman said. «But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it…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.» ..."

Richard M. Stallman recently gave a talk entitled Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club. The talk looks at the origin of copyright, and how it has evolved over time from something that originally served the benefit of the people to a tool used against them...