Ask not what the public domain can do for you... (...ask what you can do for the public domain.) The Eldred vs. Ashcroft folks are circulating a petition proposing a federal law requiring $1 copyright renewal after 50 years, or the work hits the public domain. The name-rank-serial# form has an interesting question: List something you have created using the public domain. Some of the answers: Audiotexts of Aesop's Fables, annotation of Descartes' Discours, Digital Historia Numorum: A Manual of Greek Numismatics, choral sheet-music library, Mercury Theatre on the Air, a pop opera based on Cyrano, NASA images jigsaw puzzle, French proverbs from 1611, blind audio tactile mapping system, Alexandre Dumas père website, Light and Matter physics text, Voice of Hibakusha: Eyewitness accounts of Hiroshima, Distributed RNA Secondary Structure Prediction, least-squares fitting library, collection of chess problem books, Philately of the Princely States of India, Oremus Hymnal, Allen Parker slave narrative site, Samuel Johnson's Ramblers, 18th-century Chester Co. PA tax liststranslation of Jose Zorrilla's Don Juan (1844) , Digital South-Asia Language Archive, Vedic etexts, Gary Indiana U.S. Steel Works Photograph Collection, et al. The above list was so diverse...led me to wonder, what works have Mefites created using public domain materials?
posted by jengod on Jun 16, 2003 - 20 comments