Public Domain Day 2010: A roundup
January 5th, 2010
January 1st 2010 was Public Domain Day, when around the world various works fell out of copyright and into the public domain. Back in November we put together a rough list of which works fall into the public domain:
You can find the list of 563 authors on our Public Domain Works project, which is a simple registry of artistic works that are in the public domain:
The list can be sorted by author surname, birth date, death date and number of works by clicking on the relevant headings. Notable authors include the poets William Butler Yeats and Osip Mandelstam, as well as the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud.
There were celebrations in Poland and Switzerland. Communia, the EU policy network for the digital public domain launched a new website at:
The Telegraph celebrated Public Domain Day with an editorial from Shane Richmond, Head of Technology:
Happy Public Domain Day everyone! Today is the day that copyright expires on a whole range of works. As we reported this morning, from today works by Sigmund Freud, WB Yeats, Ford Madx Ford and illustrator Arthur Rackham are today part of the public domain. They can be made cheaply available as educational editions, translated into braille or made into audiobooks, all without anyone needing to give permission or any fees changing hands. They are also available to be reinterpreted and re-used by new artists.
The Telegraph also reported an announcement from Wikimedia UK inviting people to upload sources to Wikimedia Commons:
Wikimedia UK anticipates January 1, “Public Domain Day”, 2010 being a great year for additions to the digital Wikimedia Commons. The poetry of W. B. Yeats, the works of Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Rackham’s classic children’s book illustrations all enter the public domain. When the complexities of copyright no longer encumber reuse of old works, a work that has been a “sleeper” can become a new classic. Perhaps the definitive example of this is “It’s a Wonderful Life“, the 1946 Frank Capra film that became a Christmas classic in the 1980s.
Wikimedia UK promotes the uploading of copyright-free text to Wikisource, a sister site to Wikipedia, so that it can be widely enjoyed. Audio recordings of public domain works may be added to the Wikimedia Commons site, and Wikimedia UK invites you to join us and help digitise and preserve our common cultural heritage. You can make it available for everyone to share, build on, and simply enjoy.
On a less happy note, copyright scholar James Boyle at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes:
What is entering the public domain in the United States? Sadly, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019. And wherever in the world you live, you now have to wait a very long time for anything to reach the public domain. When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture. [...] We have little reason to celebrate on Public Domain Day because our public domain has been shrinking, not growing.
More detailed comment and analysis from the Centre is available at:
See also posts from:
- Jamie Boyle on his Public Domain blog
- Everybody’s Libraries
- Creative Commons
Seasons Greetings from the Open Knowledge Foundation!
December 23rd, 2009
A big Merry Christmas from the Open Knowledge Foundation to all our friends and supporters! In the festive spirit, we’ve put together a few images, texts and audio recordings from various open knowledge projects for your delectation. If you’d have any suggestions for things to add, please let us know in the comments below. See you again in 2010!
Wikimedia Commons
Utagawa Hiroshige, “Snow falling on a town”
Utagawa Hiroshige, “A river among snowy mountains”
Utagawa Hiroshige, “Nichiren going into exile on the island of Sado”
Utagawa Hiroshige, “Oi on the Kisokaido”
Caspar David Friedrich, Winterlandschaft mit Kirche (Winter landscape with church)
Caspar David Friedrich, Verschneite Hütte (Hut in Snow)
Caspar David Friedrich, Hünengrab im Schnee (Dolmen in Snow)
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Caspar David Friedrich, Der Chasseur im Walde (The Chasseur in the Forest)
Flickr Commons
‘The Isefiorden, Spitzbergen, Norway’ from the Library of Congress
‘Snow field, Australian alps’ from the Powerhouse Museum
‘Le port de Venasque, Luchon’ by Bibliothèque de Toulouse
Project Gutenberg
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Some Christmas Stories
- Public domain text of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
- Original manuscript of A Christmas Carol
- Some Christmas Stories
Clement Clarke Moore, Twas the Night before Christmas
Librivox
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
- Dickens’ Christmas Carol read by volunteers in the Librivox community.
Clement Clarke Moore, Twas the Night before Christmas
Christmas Carols
- The Librivox community recently uploaded a collection of Christmas carols to celebrate Christmas 2009!
Internet Archive
Christmas 78 Miscellany
Which works fall into the public domain in 2010?
November 25th, 2009
On the first of January every year works from around the world fall out of copyright and into the public domain. But, how do we know which works fall into the public domain when?
In previous years there have been blog posts about this - for example, see the Everybody’s Libraries posts from 1st January 2008 and 1st January 2009. In preparation for Public Domain Day 2010, we decided to prepare our own list of authors who’s works fall into the public domain this coming January.
You can find the list of 563 authors on our Public Domain Works project, which is a simple registry of artistic works that are in the public domain:
The list can be sorted by author surname, birth date, death date and number of works by clicking on the relevant headings. Notable authors include the poets William Butler Yeats and Osip Mandelstam, as well as the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud
While this starts to answer the question What works fall into the public domain this year?, the calculation is still very basic and we hope to improve the list in two main ways:
- The results above are based on a crude life+70 computation of copyright expiry (and associated entry into the public domain). This is almost certainly wrong for some jurisdictions and for some types of work. The Public Domain Calculators project is actively working to produce jurisdiction-specific algorithms for precisely determining public domain status. Once complete this effort will be integrated into the calculations presented here. If you’d like to help out with a calculator in your jurisdiction, please get in touch!
- The list is not comprehensive - and there are many authors, composers, artists and other creators which we are missing. To improve the list we need better data about authors and works - whether from library catalogues, or other archives of information about creative works. If you know where we might be able to get hold of such data, we’d love to hear from you!
If you’d like to participate in the Public Domain Works project, please join our pd-discuss list and introduce yourself!
Documentation from the Public Domain Calculators Meeting
November 17th, 2009
Last week we had a meeting about building a set of Public Domain Calculators for countries across Europe (which we blogged about earlier this month). The public domain calculators will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction.
We started out by reviewing existing work on the calculators. We then put together first drafts of diagrams representing copyright law in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. We also started work on a tutorial to help others getting started in building public domain flow diagrams for other countries. Finally we shot some footage for a micro-short film introducing the project - so watch this space!
Documentation for the event is now available, including:
- Draft flow diagram for the United Kingdom (in PDF)
- Draft flow diagram for the Netherlands (in PDF)
- Source files for flow diagrams at the Internet Archive
- Main meeting page on wiki
- Draft questions for legal experts to help build calculators
- Photos:
- From Paul Keller
- From Mathias Klang
If you are interested in contributing to a calculator for your country - please contact us directly or join our pd-discuss list and introduce yourself!
The Public Domain Calculators meeting was organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge as part of Communia, the European policy network on the digital public domain.
Public Domain Calculators Meeting, 10-11th November 2009
October 7th, 2009
There is often a tendency to talk of ‘the public domain’ and of works falling out of copyright and ‘into the public domain’ - as though there is a single set of works which are out of copyright all over the world. In fact, of course, there are different national laws about the nature and duration of copyright in different types of works - and hence what is in the public domain is different in different countries.
We’re currently coordinating work to build a series of public domain calculators - which will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction. At the time of writing we have been in touch with groups and individuals interested in helping to build the calculators in 17 jurisdictions.
In November, the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge are hosting a meeting of European experts on copyright and the digital public domain as part of the Communia project. The purpose of the workshop is to produce materials such as legal flow charts and public domain “algorithms” which will help with the representation of different national copyright laws and the determination of public domain status.
Details of the meeting are as follows:
- When: 10-11th November 2009
- Where: Emmanuel College, University Cambridge
- Wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/PublicDomainCalculators/Meeting
- Participate: Free but space is limited. If you are interested in coming, email the organizers at: info@okfn.org
New developments on Public Domain Works!
June 18th, 2009
We have now completed a major load of data into the Public Domain Works database:
There are now 125318 persons, 12840 items and 299141 works in the database. The data we have there comes primarily from two sources: people and book data from Philip Harper’s NGCOBA and recordings data from the online discographies provided by KCL’s CHARM project.
We also have a load more sound recordings data (~ 600k items) almost ready to go courtesy of Edward Betts and the Open Library. (And we are yet to even get started on the BBC GRAMS data …).
Also work on the public domain calculators is still ticking over. Gisle Hannemyr recently put together a first draft of a copyright flowchart for Norway.
Join the pd-discuss list to get involved!
Database Back Up
September 13th, 2008
Unfortunately due to upgrades of the software on the server the Public Domain Works DB has been down recently. Now, thanks to recent coding efforts it is back up with some early (1900s) data from musicbrainz. Check it out at:
Public Domain Calculators
November 20th, 2007
As followers of the mailing list will know we are now planning to join forces with Creative Commons on the Internet Archive’s Open Library project. Our first step is to develop ‘public domain calculators’ for the different jurisdictions across Europe. Here a calculator is just an algorithm for determining whether a given work is Public Domain. Initially this algorithm can just be in the form of flow-chart, as exemplified by this chart for Canada, but eventually it should end up as code like this.
Alpha launch of Public Domain Works
August 31st, 2007
Public Domain Works advises users on the copyright status of a particular track to encourage creators and entrepreneurs to build on cultural history.
Let’s say you want to use, sample or reissue a particular track, whether its Elvis, Elgar or Elmore Judd. Reusing even a fraction of a copyright-protected track (without the express permission of the rightsholder) leaves you liable for copyright infringement. At the very least, rights holders can restrain distribution of further copies of the infringing work, or they could sue you for damages.
So before reusing tracks in your documentary or mixtape, its best to be aware of the copyright status of the different works embodied in your chosen track. If the track is public domain then you are free to reuse as you jolly well like - without asking permission from anyone. If its protected, then you should identify the rights holder and ask permission before you reuse.
The tool is only at the alpha stage so far, which means it needs a lot of work before its full launch. The dataset (i.e. tracks which users can query) is limited, the supporting literature is scarce and its largely untested. We are however very excited to improve the tool in collaboration with users, so please leave comments on the blog, email us with bugs and get in touch via the Participate page if you want to get more involved.
Public understanding of the ‘public domain’
April 20th, 2007
Last Tuesday 17th April i went to my first Own-It event - ‘Dead or Alive: Whose art work is up for grabs?’ - and was very happy to see a roomful of artists and creative types discussing the ins and outs of copyright law. I was however kinda surprised to hear their IP-expert solicitor use the phrase ‘public domain’ to indicate something entirely different to our use. He did not use the phrase to indicate an intellectual creation free from legal restraint but rather to indicate the inverse of private, as in publicly available works; works that have been published. Then an audience member asked about the rights-status of works in the ‘public domain’, and the expert answered with reference to published works, suggesting he did not associate the term with freedoms. Seems the legal profession do not understand the term ‘public domain’ in the same way our community does, something which had not occurred to me. Guess i figured it was a recognised legal concept, whereas its more an emerging notion. Should we then revise our project name before going public?
