Definition of "public domain" []

• Land owned and controlled by the state or federal government. (noun)
• The status of publications, products, and processes that are not protected under patent or copyright. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Dozens of videotapes of the CIA interrogations of Abu Zubaydah were destroyed in 2005 by a senior CIA official, Jose Rodriguez, who seems to have calculated that if the tapes ever entered the public domain they would have caused the same kind of outrage that greeted the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photographs from Iraq."
• "It does seem, however, that it must have contained some material that did not agree with the New Testament accounts of John and Jesus-otherwise it would have been preserved in the public domain in some form."
• "This image is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work of the U.S. federal government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105, of the U.S. Code."