Last Thursday, January 1st 2015, all the world celebrated the Public Domain Day, it is important to reveal what works could be bought now cheaper and used for almost any purpose. In most countries author's works become public domain 50 or 70 years after the author's death. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Da. The second was published at http://www.publicdomainday.org/. The third was published at http://creativecommons.org/tag/public-domain-day
The observance of a "Public Domain Day" was initially informal, the earliest known mention was in 2004 by Wallace Mclean, a Canadian activist, with support for the idea by Lawrence Lessig, Professor at Harvard Law School. Copyright protection terms are typically described as the life of the author plus a certain number of years after his or her death. In many jurisdictions, this usually means that 70 years have passed since the day of author's death. After that period, the works of those authors become fully available. In recent years this day has been mentioned by Project Gutemberg and has been promoted by Creative Commons. In 2012, celebration was announced in Poland, where for several years on that day various activities have been organized by free culture NGOs and other supporters. On this day, 1st January, of great celebrations worldwide, we also invite you to celebrate the impressive wealth of knowledge, information and beauty that today, like every year on this day, becomes freely available to humankind. Every year on New Year's Day, in fact, due to the expiration of copyright protection terms on works produced by authors who died several decades earlier, thousands of works enter the public domain, that is their content is no longer owned or controlled by anyone, but it rather becomes a common treasure, available for anyone to freely use for any purpose.
Each year on January 1st, copyright protection expires for millions of creative works, allowing those works to be used by anyone without restriction or need for permission. On this Public Domain day, we celebrate the rich creative works that have risen into the public domain, and mourn the massive number of works that could have been in the public domain but which are not due to unreasonable copyright extension or the chilling effects created by Byzantine copyright term schemes. While copyright terms continue to be extended and policymakers support a detrimental enforcement agenda, there has been no shortage of encouraging work in support of a robust and expanded public domain: 1) The Internet Archive announced this year a massive trove of over 1,000,0000 mostly public domain content available for download. 2) Musopen continues to be a promising project dedicated to providing free music content. 3) There is ongoing efforts to educate the public about the public domain. The Public Domain Review published the Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works online. 4) At the international policy arena, the public domain continues to be a topic on the agenda at venues like WIPO.The Communia Association has been at the forefront in championing support for broad access to public domain materials. and has been urging policymakers around the world to adopt liberal policies promoting wide access to public domain. As you can see, there is a ton of positive work being done to help increase our access to creative content in the public domain. But the work is not done: the longer we do not have access to these works the less rich our culture will be moving ahead. Let is keep working on it and demanding access to content that could and should be available to all
