Public Domain WorksBeta (v0.7a)

About Public Domain Works

Background

The Public Domain Works DB is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. It is currently focused on books and sound recordings – EU countries are currently considering a term extension for sound recordings which would have a dramatic impact on the size of the public domain. In the future it will will expand to cover all types of cultural works which are covered by copyright.

The a project was originally created in 2005 by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Free Culture UK and the Open Rights Group. The project is currently being managed by the Open Knowledge Foundation's Public Domain Working Group.

Get Involved

We're a community project in which anyone can participate. There are a whole bunch of things to do like:

  • Tell us what you think deserves working on and what can be improved.
  • Develop Public Domain 'calculators' to determine what works are PD and which are not.
  • Find more data in the form discographies, library catalogues, etc to add to the database
  • Help link the data with other data sources and materials (such as online copies of the texts and recordings themselves)

If you want to get involved just drop a line to info@okfn.org or join our public discussion list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/pd-discuss.

Acknowledgements and Credits

We are extremely grateful to Philip Harper for donating his composer data to the Public Domain and for allowing us to use his book and author data from the New General Catalog of Books and Authors (there is also a dedicated search interface). We are also very grateful to the BBC archives for giving their CAIRNS and GRAMS catalogue data to us.

License

The code for this site is licensed under an MIT license and is available via our KnowledgeForge project.

The content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (by-sa) license v2.5.

The data contained on this site is licensed under v0.9 (or any later version) of the Open Database License with the exception of any data listed as coming from the NGCOBA (this data is Mr Harper's). A full data dump will be made available soon. In the mean time full information on where data was sourced from and code for processing it can be found in our code base liste above.

More Information

You can find out more information about the project on the working group home page including a guide to copyright and the public domain and details on how to get involved in the project.