Creative Commons » public domain mark http://creativecommons.org Share, reuse, and remix — legally. Sat, 08 Mar 2014 06:31:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.1 Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online by the Open Knowledge Foundation http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/31431 http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/31431#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:01:54 +0000 http://creativecommons.org/?p=31431 The Open Knowledge Foundation has published a nifty guide on the basics of Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online. You can skim the guide in well under ten minutes, and it includes useful links and accompanying descriptions to online collections where PD works can be found, including Europeana, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. It also contains quite a few references to Creative Commons and succinct explanations of the relevant CC tools, such as the Public Domain Mark and the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. The guide, like all articles at The Public Domain Review, is available for reuse under CC BY.


Bibliotheca Buloviana (Ausschnitt) / Georg Daniel Heumann / Public Domain

]]>
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/31431/feed 1
Improving Access to the Public Domain: the Public Domain Mark http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23830 http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23830#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:52:14 +0000 http://creativecommons.org/?p=23830

Today, Creative Commons announces the release of its Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that allows them to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark, to be used for marking works already free of copyright, complements Creative Commons’ CC0 public domain dedication, which enables authors to relinquish their rights prior to the expiration of copyright.

“The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality,” said Michael Carroll, a founding board member of Creative Commons and a law professor at American University.

Europeana—Europe’s digital library, museum and archive—is the first major adopter of the Public Domain Mark. Europeana estimates that by mid-2011, the Public Domain Mark will be used in connection with millions of out-of-copyright works made available through its portal.

“An important part of our mandate is to ensure that digitized works made available through Europeana are properly labeled with rights information, including when a work is free of known copyright restrictions so that teachers, students and others can freely use it in their work, changing it and remixing it as they wish,” noted Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana.

The Public Domain Mark in its current form is intended for use with works that are free of known copyright around the world, primarily old works that are beyond the reach of copyright in all jurisdictions. We have already started mapping the next phases of our public domain work, which will look at ways to identify and mark works that are in the public domain in a limited number of countries.

A final note about design. We took this opportunity to revise the CC0 deed, to align it more closely with the Public Domain Mark deed. We think the design changes will help everyone recognize the difference between our licenses, which apply to works restricted by copyright, and our public domain tools.

For more information, read the full press release.

]]>
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/23830/feed 14
Marking and Tagging the Public Domain: An Invitation to Comment http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/22940 http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/22940#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 22:31:33 +0000 http://creativecommons.org/?p=22940 Almost 1½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.

We are publishing today for comment our new Public Domain Mark, a tool that allows works already in the public domain to be marked and tagged in a way that clearly communicates the work’s PD status, and allows it to be easily discoverable. The PDM is not a legal instrument like CC0 or our licenses — it can only be used to label a work with information about its public domain copyright status, not change a work’s current status under copyright. However, just like CC0 and our licenses, PDM has a metadata-supported deed and is machine readable, allowing works tagged with PDM to be findable on the Internet. (Please note that the example used on the sample deed is purely hypothetical at the moment.)

We are also releasing for public comment general purpose norms — voluntary guidelines or “pleases” that providers and curators of PD materials may request be followed when a PD work they have marked is thereafter used by others. Our PDM deed as well as an upcoming enhanced CC0 deed will support norms in addition to citation metadata, which will allow a user to easily cite the author or provider of the work through copy-paste HTML.

The public comment period will close on Wednesday, August 18th. Why so short? For starters, PDM is not a legal tool in the same sense our licenses and CC0 are legally operative — no legal rights are being surrendered or affected, and there is no accompanying legal code to finesse. Just as importantly, however, we believe that having the mark used soon rather than later will allow early adopters to provide us with invaluable feedback on actual implementations, which will allow us to improve the marking tool in the future.

The primary venue for submitting comments and discussing the tool is the cc-licenses mailing list. We look forward to hearing from you!

]]>
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/22940/feed 8
http://creativecommons.org/tag/public-domain-mark/feed/rss
creativecommons.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-10
13304
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VRAFS5WVKHMBH46HGSTSWLRGQABLLXFU
<urn:uuid:247278d5-8ab7-45fb-a502-fd08c1ec6462>
2014-03-08T12:19:49Z
54.201.42.70
sha1:V2XVYTEWTFRD4KDBQYVFYGLGODDENMZK
<urn:uuid:ecbee669-0127-4c1f-96ef-45ff6f83b176>
http://creativecommons.org/tag/public-domain-mark/feed/rss
response
<urn:uuid:f907a0c8-9d10-4e84-9785-cce659fe67fe>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-10
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf