Today is Public Domain Day! How About a Few Resources?
The year gets underway with this special day that is an initiative of COMMUNIA, the European thematic network on the digital public domain.
Every year on New Year's Day, in fact, due to the expiration of copyright protection terms on works produced by authors who died several decades earlier, thousands of works enter the public domain - that is, their content is no longer owned or controlled by anyone, but it rather becomes a common treasure, available for anyone to freely use for any purpose.
Such works can also become a building block for new creations: people can transform a poem into song lyrics, or make a movie based on a public domain novel (check your local movie theaters to see how often that happens!). Literary works can be published on personal website and/or printed for friends or school distribution. Of course, you can also decide, for instance, to professionally print a beautiful hardcover leather-bound edition of a public domain book and sell it for a profit, while the book content will remain available for anyone to use freely. And the same goes for images, art works and other kinds of creative works entering the public domain under the same term expiration rule.
The website is full of resources that can be used today or any other day. Here are a few of them.
Public Domain Works is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. You can find out more about the project here. There are currently 125318 persons, 12840 items and 299141 works in the database.
Second, Sprixi, a searchable database for public domain images.
Want to know if a specific work is in the public domain? (Or, if it's not, when it will be?) Give the copyright term calculator a spin. You'll need to provide some information about the work — for example, whether it's published or unpublished. But the calculator keeps track of which US copyright act applies to the work in question, so you don't have to.
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