Public Domain Detective (US)
Description:
   
Works in the public domain belong to everyone -- the public -- and and everyone is free to use them however they choose. Unfortunately, works in the public domain can be hard to spot. In this challenge you will learn what is in the public domain, how to identify public domain work, and some good places to find public domain resources. Because public domain rules vary so much from country to country, this course focuses on the public domain in the United States. 
    
1) Elementary, my dear Watson
An introduction to the public domain

Introduction
Material that it is in the public domain is free from all copyright restrictions. As it was first envisioned in the United States, copyright was meant to provide a monopoly to creators for a limited time, after which the work would enter the public domain and would belong to everyone. While copyright now lasts for a very long time (typically the life of the author plus seventy years after the author has died), there are many works, mostly older ones, that have entered the public domain. Good examples of public domain content are the writings of Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle, the music of Beethoven and Mozart, and most of the early silent films.

Reading
(I don't know about just having a big chunk of reading as a task, without anything else accompanying. There are so many sections to Chapter 8 -- are they all necessary to read for this challenge -- to be able to identify a public domain work?)
Work your way through Chapter 8 of Stanford University's Copyright and Fair Use Overview, which covers the public domain. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter8/index.html

Additional reading: If you want to learn more about not just the public domain but also fair use, the comic Bound By Law: Tales from the Public Domain is a wonderful and entertaining resource. http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital.php

[Image for illustrating: http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/boundbylaw_hi-res_small.jpg]

Discussion

Share your thoughts and ask any questions you had about the reading in the discussion section. Did anything jump out at you? Were you surprised by anything you learned? Was anything extra confusing?

2) Finding clues and making deductions
Learn how to identify public domain work on the web

Overview
Now you should know how to tell whether a work is in the public domain in theory, but it gets a lot more challenging in practice. Say you have a book in your hands. It's pretty old. The author is dead. You're pretty sure it was published sometime in the early 1900's. But how can you tell for sure? The best way would be by looking at the copyright notice. In books that's pretty easy. 

Here is a copy the copyright notice from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It comes right after the title page. 
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015049217741;q1=sherlock%20holmes;page=root;seq=11;view=1up;size=100;orient=0

So clean, so simple. It doesn't even use the (c) symbol we all know and love. The book was published in the United States in 1892 and is therefore definitely in the public domain today. (But we don't mention the year things fall into the public domain yet -- we just assume the person has done all of the reading. Maybe best to provide some bullets on what kinds of things are in the PD, and offer a tool -- like one of the many library PD scale tools?) But what about things that don't have title pages. What about content on the web? How can you tell then? 

Frequently, libraries and archives that have gone to the trouble to digitize and publish their public domain holdings have also marked them with additional information that can help you confirm the copyright status. 

For example, the copy of Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was digitized and put online by the University of Michigan. It's part of a giant digital library called HathiTrust. In addition to the full text of the book, HathiTrust also provides a catalog record http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000207878, which clearly includes the publication date. Online collections of images are similar. 

Here is a photograph of Arthur Conan Doyle on Flickr. It is a part of the Flickr Commons, and was published there by the Library of Congress. You can see that below the image there is information about the source, including the year it was taken. 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/3048507332/

Hint
Not all public domain works are very old. Works created by the United States government are in the public domain the moment they're created, as are government documents from many states and some other countries. People also have the option to dedicate their work to the public domain as soon as they've created it by using a CC0 mark (sometimes called CC Zero). CC0 is   a "no rights reserved"  mark, which enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright-protected content to waive their rights and place their works in the public domain.

Exercise
Below are the titles and links to several creative works that may or may not be in the public domain. Determine the copyright status of each one, and report your results in the discussion, including how you came to the conclusion you did. 

3) Pursue the suspect
Know where to look for public domain content          

There is public domain content all over the web, and you may stumble across it occasionally it as you go about your rounds. However, there are several excellent repositories of PD materials that make it easy to find images, books, music, and video that you are free to use. 

Exercise 
Go explore some of our favorite repositories of public domain content. Find one cool thing from each place, and come back here to post links. (maybe have a more specific ask, like find a photo of a ___, or stuff pertaining to ____)
The Flickr Commons hosts a collection of photos that have no known copyright restrctions ( perhaps we ought to re-iterate what Flickr Commons say about the difference betwen 'no known copyright restrictions' and bona fide public domain material ( see http://www.flickr.com/commons/usage/ ). Hopefully students will be sensitive to this difference from what's written above, but may be worth noting.) . http://www.flickr.com/commons
The HathiTrust is a digital library of over 10 million books, all openly licensed, mostly in the public domain. http://hathitrust.org
Project Gutenberg is a collection of ebooks, most of which are in the  public domain. They also have a sheet music project. http://www.gutenberg.org/
The Internet Archive has a live music collection and a moving picture collection, as well as lots of other audio and text materials. http://archive.org/


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