SgtChaireBourne - Slashdot User

Submission + - What Could Have Been in the Public Domain on Janua (duke.edu) 1

Submitted by SgtChaireBourne on Sunday January 01, 2012 @09:56AM

SgtChaireBourne writes: Many works published in 1955 would have entered the public domain this year.
Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has an overview of the movies, books, songs and historical works that are kept out of the public domain by changes to copyright law since 1978. Instead of seeing these enter the public domain in 2012, we will have to wait until 2051 before being able to use these works without restriction.

Submission + - Make legacy formats public domain

Submitted by

SgtChaireBourne

on Tuesday January 15, 2008 @03:56AM

SgtChaireBourne writes: "NLnet, a Dutch foundation for an open information society, calls for the maker of a widely used office suite to release its depreciated formats into the public domain. The maker of the infamous productivity suits has made large efforts during the last year to move against the industry backed standard, the OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 26300). These efforts have been producing a lot of commentary regarding the amount of data bound up in the Redmond-based company's undocumented, proprietary, binary specifications. It's a nasty situation to end up with files that cannot be read because the sole vendor with the documentation for the files has withdrawn permission. ODF is the way forward, or a step forward at the least, with new documents. But for the old documents in the legacy formats, the cannot be read without supporting software and that support requires full access to the specifications."

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