The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation.

We’re currently looking for more people to help map copyright law in countries around the world – so we can make it easier for people to find and reuse works which have entered the public domain.

We’re particularly keen to contact law students, whether at graduate or undergraduate level. Hence if you know people who are studying or teaching at law schools we’d be eternally grateful if you could help to pass this note on to them!

HELP TO MAP THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AROUND THE WORLD!

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open knowledge in all its forms – from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata. This includes work to make it easier for people to find and reuse works which have entered the public domain in their country.

We are currently seeking volunteers to help us to develop and review a set of Public Domain Calculators for countries around the world. These help people determine whether or not a given work is still protected by copyright (to find out more see our 5 minute film!). We want to combine these calculators with large collections of data about works to enable people to find out which works are in the public domain in their country and enable them to find, download and share copies of these works.

There are currently 15 completed flowcharts (USA, Canada, UK, Spain and Norway), one of which has already been implemented into code (UK). We’ve got a growing network of legal experts, developers and advocates in over 30 countries. We want to build on this to create and review calculators for more countries around the world.

If you’re interested in helping out, please email jonathan.gray@okfn.org and primavera.defilippi@okfn.org – or join our mailing list and introduce yourself at: .

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Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.

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