The Public Domain Mark operates as a tag or a label, allowing institutions like those as well as others with such knowledge to communicate that a work is no longer restricted by copyright and can be freely used by others.  The mark can also be an important source of information, allowing others to verify a work’s copyright status and learn more about the work.

Our public domain tools, on the other hand, enable authors and copyright owners who want to dedicate their works to the worldwide public domain to do so, and facilitate the labeling and discovery of works that are already free of known copyright restrictions.

Copyright Statute are only guidelines for making a determination as to whether a use is fair.  Each factor should be given careful consideration in analyzing any specific use. 

determine whether their activities are within the limits of fair use under U.S. copyright law

There is an intimate connection between informal conversations, the kind that take place in communities and virtual communities, in the coffee shops and computer conferences, and the ability of large social groups to govern themselves without monarchs or dictators. This social-political connection shares a metaphor with the idea of cyberspace, for it takes place in a kind of virtual space that has come to be known by specialists as the public sphere.

there are actually banks of people sitting in front of monitors somewhere, reading postings from Prodigy subscribers, erasing the ones with offensive content. This measure dealt effectively with the outbreak of racist and anti-Semitic invective.

The goal of every hacker is to attain the system powers granted only to the person who knows the system password, and that includes the power to erase all records of previous conversations, all current e-mail, everything in everybody's private file area. Most hackers just want to explore. Others are vandals.

He meets the locals, who are frustrated by the old ways of doing things. Hughes takes out his laptop, plugs it into the nearest telephone, reveals the scope and power of the Net, and enlightens the crowd. He tempts them into putting their hands on the keyboard, and they're hooked. When Hughes rides out of town, the town is on the Net.

It is a mass medium because any piece of information put onto the Net has a potential worldwide reach of millions. But it differs from conventional mass media in several respects. Every individual who has the ability to read a Usenet posting has the ability to reply or to create a new posting. In television, newspapers, magazines, films, and radio, a small number of people have the power to determine which information should be made available to the mass audience. In Usenet, every member of the audience is also potentially a publisher.

The word anarchy is frequently used to describe Usenet, not in the sense of chaotic and disorganized, but in the sense that the whole enterprise of moving all these words from all these people to all these other people is accomplished with no central governing hierarchy on either policy or technical levels. This grew directly out of the way Usenet postings were designed to be passed around the loosely coupled UUCP network. From the beginning, there was no emphasis on a central organization.

Without competition, they say, the government will have created a monopoly that has little incentive to innovate,"

Unix was designed for programmers of interactive computers who needed to be able to build tools for each other, share those tools, and propagate successful tools throughout the programmer community

The vision of a citizen-designed, citizen-controlled worldwide communications network is a version of technological utopianism that could be called the vision of "the electronic agora."

to facilitate communications among interesting people in the San Francisco Bay area,

It would be a self-designing experiment. . . . The early users were to design the system for later users. The usage of the system would co-evolve with the system as it was built. . . .

Some people--many people--don't do well in spontaneous spoken interaction, but turn out to have valuable contributions to make in a conversation in which they have time to think about what to say.

both as it affects my family and what is known about it generally.

Divide students into staged groups that rotate with different assignments. Make one group the “first responders,” the second group the “arguers,” and the third group the “consensus builders,” to insure that students engage with their peers.