There has been a lot of talk recently about using public domain work as a basis for content…for websites, books, ebooks, etc. One thing that is very tempting about it is that it is already written and may be copied and used for free with no worry about copyright infringement. It does offer a virtually unlimited source of text, images, movies, audios, etc. if you know where to look. It can be very frustrating if you don’t know the best places to look, because you can spend hours without finding anything usable. There are some strict laws regarding what is public domain and what is not. Please understand that I am not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice in this article.
There are 2 types of content that is definitely in the Public Domain. Anything published before 1923 and anything developed and distributed by the US Government (US Government items are only available to US based individuals and companies). The reason for this is that before 1923 there were no copyright laws and there is a federal law stating that US Government works are Public Domain, under the theory that it was developed using public funding so the public has the right to use it. One thing you have to be careful of is that in recent years the US Government has started contracting out some of the development work. For that work the developer has a copyright.
For works published between 1923 and 1963 there was a copyright that had to be renewed after 28 years, so it takes a bit of research to find out if the work is protected or not. Basically you have to look it up. You go to the 28th year to see if there is a new registration. One place to do this is the listing at the University of Pensylvania (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/). They have listings for all types of content…books, magazines, audios, works of art, etc. If you are trying to check a magazine article you have to look at both the title of the magazine and the title of the article, because the author may have renewed the copyright on the article itself.
The easiest way to start is with books published before 1923. Go to www.books.google.com. In the left column about half way down the page you can specify a date range. Put in a start date of 1700 and an end date of 1922. Enter a subject or author in the search box at the top and you will get a list of books that were published before 1923.
Now, some of the information in the books is dated, and you won’t find anything about Online Marketing, but a lot of the subjects…gardening, cooking, photography, dog training…are timeless and there is a lot of information there. There are also a lot of illustrations that you can use since they, as well, are public domain.
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