Copright week: Public Domain Day

copyrightweek

From 13 to 18 January the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is organising Copyright Week, an event focused on promoting six key principles for guiding copyright policy and practice. Each day is dedicated to one of the principles: today’s principle is ‘Building and defending a robust public domain’:

The public domain is our cultural commons and a public trust. Copyright policy should seek to promote, and not diminish, this crucial resource.

OpenGLAM strongly supports this principle: as part of our OpenGLAM principles we recommend that digital representations of works for which copyright has expired should be explicitly marked with an appropriate legal tool such as the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark and be kept in the digital domain by not adding new rights to them. This promotes the maximum possible reuse of the content.

In addition, we closely collaborate with The Public Domain Review, the Open Knowledge Foundation project showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available online.

If you would like to contribute to building and defending a robust public domain, there are a number of options:

  • Sign on through the EFF to support their copyright principles
  • Donate to The Public Domain Review to support its work in promoting the public domain
  • Follow The Public Domain Review through their newsletter, Twitter, Facebook or website to stay informed of new public domain collections and other relevant news in this area