The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain: Section 104A – Authors Alliance

"As anyone who has ever lived in an old house knows, sometimes additions and renovations are great. Sometimes they are good ideas but poorly executed. And sometimes they are just bad ideas from the start. That last category is where I’d put 104A.

Section 104A is responsible for one of the greatest contractions of the public domain in history. It’s the first provision we’ve covered in this series that wasn’t part of the original 1976 Act — it was a later addition that fundamentally changed the landscape of what works could be freely used in the United States. Section 104A was first added to Title 17 in December of 1993 as part of a series of changes related to the North American Free Trade Agreement (originally covering only motion pictures produced in NAFTA countries). But Section 104A is best known for its later amendments, which implemented the Uruguay Round Agreement (which also led to the creation of the WTO) through the Uruguay Round Agreements Act. The very short version of 104A’s function is that it expanded — I refuse to say “restored” — copyright protection to innumerable foreign works from all around the world that were already in the public domain in the United States."