The number one question I’m asked by non-writers is always about copyrights. For some reason, most people who do not write well are exceedingly concerned that somebody will steal something they have written. I think that’s extremely amusing, considering that most of the dreadful copy produced by non-writers is highly undesirable. But most non-writers fear the theft of their writing because they believe that written words are very valuable stuff and that writers are exceedingly well compensated. That is even more amusing, and just generally shows that most non-writers do not know actual writers.

Writers, on the other hand, are often on the prowl seeking after things that are not copyrighted for a variety of reasons. If you own any of those content-eating things like a blog or a website, you occasionally need to fill it with more content than your own ten little fingers can produce, so you may want some public domain stuff.  Furthermore, writers often seek to bulk up their own work with items procured from other sources. If you are in the position where you have to define what quality-adjusted-life-years in a cost-effectiveness analysis of a particular medical therapy is (I did that yesterday–I’m not making this up) then you really don’t want to take somebody else’s hard-wrought definition and rework it to avoid plagiarism.

So herewith are things that even the righteous can steal because they have no copyright.

1. Nothing on a U.S. federal government website is copyright. You can lift charts, graphs, text, definitions, or whatever you want. Now a genuine writer would attribute it, but you don’t need to fuss. All of those cool statistics from the CDC (cdc.gov has just about every health statistic you can imagine) are yours.
2. Wikipedia is not copyright. Now I don’t believe the purpose of Wikipedia was to be a plagiarist’s best friend so I recommend attributing what you take and using it more like a reference. I use Wikipedia a lot but I take bits and pieces and rewrite it.  But technically, what’s on Wikipedia is not copyright. By the way, if you add something to Wikipedia, it’s not copyright, either.
3. Anything in the public domain. I’m not a lawyer or an expert but U.S. copyright law is like the date stamp on your yogurt. Eventually, it’s not good any more. I really forget the cutoff date but it’s something like in the 1920s. What this means is that really old works are no longer copyright. You can take them. I think technically you can even sign your name to them (such as The Origin of Species by Joe Smith) but I’m not a lawyer. This is tricky ground but there are occasions where you can grab old texts and pawn them off as your own (or use them as resource material).
4. You can’t copyright ideas. You can copyright a specific group of words, but you can’t copyright the idea behind them. For instance, I can write about things that aren’t copyrighted and, in an ironic twist, do it in a document that is copyrighted. This blog is copyrighted. You really are not supposed to lift this article and you certainly aren’t supposed to take it word-for-word and slap your own name to it. But if you wanted to do a similar story about things that are not protected by copyrights, you could. I can’t hold the copyright to the idea–only to the way I execute the idea.

And execute it a good word. This story is not intended to give aid and succor to plagiarists, but it is there to help those who feed the content machine know where they may look.

My grandfather was a sculptor. He earned his living in this way and he sometimes crafted original pieces that he used to make molds so that he could reproduce certain favorite items. He was very diligent about getting his creations copyrighted, and from time to time, somebody would buy one and make their own mold and sell their own reproductions. My grandfather was always very tickled when this happened. Not a fun-loving man by nature, he was always sort of gratified that he was, in his words, “good enough to steal from.”

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