How Do You Know The Public Domain Is In Trouble? It Requires A 52-Page Handbook To Determine If Something Is Public Domain

From Techdirt:

from the not-how-it's-supposed-to-work dept
We..., frankly, believe that many more works should be in the public domain. In fact, we treat our own articles, written by staffers here, to be public domain, even though there's no official legal mechanism to officially put them in the public domain. We can only proactively state that we will treat them as such. And, of course, thanks to the switch from "opt-in" copyright to "everything eligible is automatically covered by copyright" in 1976, combined with ever-farther-reaching copyright term extension, nothing has officially entered the public domain in the US in ages.

So it's great to see that the folks over at the Samuelson Clinic at Berkeley have developed a detailed handbook to determine what is in the public domain, which comes complete with this handy-dandy (if not altogether simple) graphic.