About

Summary

The Public Domain Works DB is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. It is focused on sound recordings (and their underlying compositions) because a term extension for sound recordings is currently being considered in Europe. In the future it will will expand to cover all types of cultural works which are covered by copyright. The DB is a joint project of Free Culture UK and the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Rights Group.

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Introduction

The existence of an accessible public domain of cultural works is essential to the business of educators, academics, artists and critics alike. Originally, in order to benefit from copyright protection for a work, authors were required to register the work and deposit a copy at a central registry. This ensured that the identity of the work’s author could always be known, and that both copyright and public domain works could be easily identified.

Today it is no longer necessary to do this. Any work eligible for protection is covered from the time of the making or publication of the work, without any need to register that work as being protected, or to mark it as such. As a result, the process of identifying protected or public domain works is no longer trivial, as there is no central registry for copyrighted works, determining whether or not a work is still covered can rely on guesswork, or substantial (and costly) investigation. This is an unsatisfactory situation, as the prohibitive cost and time commitment involved in ascertaining whether a work is or is not in the public domain stifles creativity that could otherwise profit from the existence of public domain works.

Public Domain or Not? A Complex Question

In order to determine whether a work is public domain several facts about it need to be ascertained: the date the work was first published, the name(s) of any contributing authors, and the dates of the death of these authors, if they are deceased.

In addition, it is important, particularly in the case of sound recordings, to ascertain the same information about copyrights that the work in question may derive from. For example, in order to determine the Copyright status of a sound recording we would need to know:

For example, in the case of Elvis Presley’s ‘That’s Alright’, we would ascertain that as the recording was made in 1955 and the term of copyright on sound recordings currently stands at 50 years, that the recording passed into the public domain in 2005. However, as the song itself (the ‘underlying musical work’) was composed by Billy Crudup (who died in 1974), and is covered by a standard term of life plus 70 years, it will enter the public domain in 2044.

As the reader can imagine, for recordings of songs with multiple composers, or recordings incorporating a number of musical works, this calculation is complicated even further.

A Public Domain Registry for the EU

In order to combat this problem and ease the difficulties involved in ascertaining whether a work is in the public domain, Free Culture UK in association with the Open Knowledge Foundation plan to build a ‘'’Public Domain Registry”’ which will list cultural works that have entered the public domain or which are about to fall out of copyright.

The project will initially focusing on sound recordings because of the current debate in the EU about the extension of the term of copyright for works. Such an extension, (particularly when applied retroactively, as in this case) would significantly reduce the size of the public domain but in the absence of a Registry of the type we are proposing, this loss cannot be accurately quantified.

This registry will take the form of a wiki-like database and associated web application storing the above details for as many cultural artefacts as possible. With this data stored, it would then be possible to determine programmatically or by hand which works are currently in the Public Domain. A major aim of the project is to harness community and volunteer involvement in the process of finding and entering information as well as in determination of the copyright status of the work and so the system will be designed to allow decentralized collaborative contributions in a wiki-like way.