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Digital Copyright Article
This is a selection made from among articles on Digital Copyright. For a permanent link to this article, or to bookmark it for future reading, click here.
What is the Public Domain?
from: Soren JordansenIn the last few years more and more people have been discovering the potential of public domain products. This is one way to have your own unique product to market, without having to write it yourself.
The term, “Public domain”, refers to books or other creative works like music, paintings, movies and photography, whose copyright has expired, or which were never subject to copyright in the first place. As they are not copyright protected, you are free to copy them and use them in any way you wish, including re-selling them for profit.
You have probably come seen a lot of products created from public domain content, without even knowing it, so here is an example.
When Walt Disney started production on his classic film Snow White he did not write the story himself. The fairy tale Snow White was a part of old European folk lore and the tale was written down and published by the brothers Grimm long before Disney started his cartoon studio. The Grimm brothers fairy tales where not under copy right protection though and all Disney had to do was snap it up and adapt the storyline to his cartoon format and success was in the making.
Of course you don’t have to be a cartoonist to utilize public domain products. Many people have made an excellent living selling them on eBay, even if they bought them there in the first place! One person sells many copies, each month, of CDs of Victorian knitting, crochet and craftwork patterns, which she first found on eBay! Another found an illustrated dog book from 1880, covering lots of different breeds, and republished each breed section separately. This has proved an extremely popular seller on eBay.
Copyright laws differ in various parts of the world, US copyright law can be extremely complicated, and you are better safe than sorry. You can hire an attorney to do the search for you, or a cheaper option is to make direct contact with the Copyright Office in Washington DC.
Once you have found a product you are certain is in the public domain, first of all make changes to it and copyright it yourself! This way nobody else will be able to use it. For instance, in the case of a book, change the title, add illustrations, update out-of-date spellings and grammar. Then either photocopy the book and give it a spiral binding, or scan the pages to text format and flow back into a Word document, to sell in printed or digital form using PDF.
Don’t forget that “public domain” doesn’t just include books. One person found an old photograph from 1880 which she re-created as a print, a poster, a fridge magnet and other products to sell on eBay. Another created a range of jewelry out of illustrations from an early geographical magazine. And there are music sites from which you can download public domain music to put on CD or MP3!
Once you realize the potential of the public domain, you will slap yourself silly for not getting started earlier!
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To see more of The Wenatchee World or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.wenworld.com. Copyright (c) 2008, The Wenatchee World, Wash. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup ...
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