Jenkins appears on CBS Sunday Morning
Clinical Professor of Law Jennifer Jenkins JD/MA ’97 was featured in a CBS News Sunday Morning segment on copyright and the public domain on April 14. Jenkins, director of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, told correspondent Lee Cowan that allowing works into the public domain inspires new art and can revive forgotten books, music, and movies.
Filming took place at campus locations including a movie theater at the Rubenstein Arts Center, where Jenkins and Cowan watched Steamboat Willie, a 1928 Disney short film with the first earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse that entered the public domain on Jan. 1. Other such works whose copyright expired included D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Cole Porter’s composition Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) from the musical Paris. “The public domain doesn’t represent the death of copyright,” Jenkins said. “It’s just the second part of copyright’s life cycle.”
