tim's journal

Are press releases public domain?

I've always wondered this... here's what I found.

Small market newsletters, magazines and newspapers will often use your press release in entirety to keep the ads from bumping together. Many of those publications cannot afford to pay for editorial content and welcome press releases as public domain work -- which they are.

A rather dated newsgroup post claims that it is so, but where can one find a more official source?

According to Yale and Carothers [1],

Once that press release or PSA is sent out, you cannot take it out of circulation, and you can't control its use. It has been publicly distributed, and it is probably public domain under the copyright law. Anyone who has it can use it for any purpose. [emphasis added]

Bryman [2] has this to say

Companies (and indeed organizations generally) produce many documents. Some of these are in the public domain, such as annual reports, mission statements, press releases, advertisements, and public relations material in printed form or on the World Wide Web. [emphasis added]

Cairncross [3] mentions "information that has always been in the public domain but was previously inaccessible to most people - because it was held in some special place, or released only to specialists. Press releases, for instance, once landed only on the desks of journalists. Now anybody can read press releases on a company's Web site." [emphasis added]

I think it is pretty clear, press releases are in the public domain. Enjoy!

References
[1] D.R. Yale and A.J. Carothers, The publicity handbook : the inside scoop from more than 100 journalists and PR pros on how to get great publicity coverage : in print, online, and on the air, Chicago, Ill.: NTC Business Books, 2001, p. 66.
[2] A. Bryman, Social research methods, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 376.
[3] F. Cairncross, The death of distance : how the communications revolution is changing our lives, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001, p. 80.

Posted by torque at August 11, 2004 10:42 AM | TrackBack