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Complications of the U.S. Public Domain

Here is a useful and informative article about copyright by Peter Hirtle, Senior Policy Advisor at Cornell University Library. It includes a section on “The confusing case of government works.”

Think 1923 is the magic year? Think again! “Probably the oldest work still protected by copyright in the U.S. is a letter from John Adams to Nathan Webb written on Sept. 1, 1755.”

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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