Why is Stanfords Center for Internet and Society involved?
Emily is not a corporation. She does not expect to make a great deal of money from her book. But her book does represent an important value in our legal tradition: that works in the public domain can be used by the public “without restraint,” as Justice Story put it. The Stanford Center is dedicated to defending and advancing the values of the public domain – not in conflict with copyright, but to complement copyright. We believe Emily Somma deserves a copyright for her derivative work. But we also believe she should be free to build that work out of material in the public domain.
