"The Baldwin Project seeks to make available online a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers of children. Our focus, initially, is on literature for children that is in the public domain in the United States. This includes all works first published before 1923."
posted on Oct 5, 2008 - View this thread

Barnacle Press : archive of mostly public domain newspaper comics. Loads of good stuff, but some highlights not previously mentioned include (especially) Ella Cinders, an stylishly written flapper-Cinderella update; the less clever but still charming Cinderella Suze; the appallingly cute Diary of Snubs, Our Dog; Foxy Grandpa, about a grandfather who outsmarts prank-happy kids; The Hurry Up New Yorker, a kinetically drawn one-joke strip; The Newlyweds' Baby, about a cartoon-sexually-dimorphic couple with a terrible baby; Doesn't It Seem Strange, sort of a beautifully illustrated 'They'll Do It Every Time' for 1903-4; Bringing Up Father, class comedy with lots of rolling pin violence; the freaky-deaky Terrors of the Tiny Tads. (Main link previously posted a couple of times in 2005, but new stuff has been added since then, and the site's been redesigned.)
posted on Sep 2, 2008 - View this thread

His is the most vigorously defended copyright in history, the reason behind the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. But Mickey Mouse may already be in the public domain. (Via)
posted on Aug 22, 2008 - View this thread

Copyright, copywrong, copyleft, copyWHAT?! Peter Hirtle is no stranger to the questions surrounding copyright and the use of public domain materials. He has been thoroughl in researching and referencing other's work in this area. Peter's handy little chart could not have been more timely; it was really long overdue. But it really just gets overwhelming sometimes ... I blame it all on that d*m**d mouse!
posted on Jul 16, 2008 - View this thread

"For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable." How do you know? The renewal copyright records have traditionally been scattered and hard to access, but Google - with the help of Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word - has just released a single database as a freely downloadable XML file.
posted on Jun 25, 2008 - View this thread

djb releases code to public domain, including qmail.
posted on Nov 30, 2007 - View this thread

Here are two seminal vampire films: Carl Dreyer's Vampyr and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu.
posted on Oct 26, 2007 - View this thread

CreateSpace is the new name of Amazon's on-demand self-publishing service for the super long tail of books, audio CD's and film DVD/Blue-ray. Products automatically get an ISBN number and are listed on Amazon.com, including "Search Inside" for books. The National Archives and CreateSpace will be publishing movies from its collection of over 200,000 public domain films, raising some provocative copyright issues.
posted on Aug 8, 2007 - View this thread

As Image Comics prepares to resurrect Golden Age comics under the rubric of public domain, it may be worth revisiting heroes of yore, like Stardust (by Hank Fletcher), Fantomah and Titan. Even more can be found through the Pure Excitement reprint webzine, (unfortunately burdened with clumsy navigation— modify the final segment for all 36 issues).

Of course, a fair number of them do show up on the Stupid Comics page, like Fantomah versus the Weird Gorillas, alongside more modern mockeries of books like Man or Astroman and Superman meets the Quik Bunny.
posted on Jul 25, 2007 - View this thread

Public Domain Photos [via mefi projects]. An extraordinarily rich resource for free stock photography.
posted on Jun 22, 2007 - View this thread

The non-profit group, Public.resource.org, are challenging the Smithsonian Institution by downloading all 6,288 (mostly) public domain photographs from the very restrictive Smithsonian Images site and reposting them to Flickr. [more: here, here] {via Ramage}
posted on May 18, 2007 - View this thread

The International Music Score Library Project. PDF downloads of public domain classical music scores. From solo piano to full symphony orchestra. 2,762 works and counting.
posted on Apr 18, 2007 - View this thread

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales asks: Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license? Photos libraries? textbooks? newspaper archives? Be bold, be specific, be general, brainstorm, have fun with it. And they do.
posted on Oct 22, 2006 - View this thread

The Royal Society Digital Archive is now on-line and free to use ... until December. Until that time, every article in its collections, going back to 1665, is freely accessible. Poke around, who knows what you might find ... [pdf]
posted on Sep 22, 2006 - View this thread

Free Movies, Documentaries, Cartoons, TV-Shows, Music & Comedy - 100% handpicked content chosen to inform, educate, shock and entertain you. Most of the old films and cartoons are in public domain: "when a work's copyright or patent restrictions expire, it enters the public domain and may be used by anyone for any purpose." The newer media is probably not in public domain, they are just freely available for some unknown reason. Tomorrow they could be gone.
posted on Sep 18, 2006 - View this thread

OpenCRS - easy access to US Congressional Research Service Reports
posted on Jun 28, 2005 - View this thread

Make a story using public-domain images on this quirky little site. If you like that, you may like Inventing Situations which is a haven for people who used to frequent The Sci Fi Channel's now defunct Caption This! site. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry... it was all just a very lucid dream.
posted on Apr 11, 2005 - View this thread

Speaking of free audio books, Project Gutenberg is currently working on releasing about 500 free, public domain audio books in mp3 format. Among the titles included are Melville's Typee, A Midsummer Night's Dream,A Modest Proposal, Huck Finn, and many, many more. I have some Great Expectations for this one...
posted on Mar 27, 2004 - View this thread

A free, blogger-read version of Lawrence Lessig's new book, Free Culture is being produced. The book is released under a Creative Commons license which allows non-commercial derivative works to be created from it. (Some chapters are already available.) This is great - I think it would be a fine thing if more people produced audio versions of open-licensed or public domain works in this manner. (From boingboing)
posted on Mar 27, 2004 - View this thread

Night of the Living Dead in 95 minutes with bunnies. I lied about the bunnies.
posted on Mar 26, 2004 - View this thread

Telltale Weekly launched today. It's public domain meets Creative Commons meets Ogg Vorbis. Their mission is to build a free audiobook library of public domain texts. Four are available now, but Twain, Chekov Doctorow (Corry, not E.L.) and more are on the way.
posted on Feb 27, 2004 - View this thread

An anotated list of the best-selling classics, (as compiled by Book Magazine), showing the years in which they will become public domain under current copyright law. Fans of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises will be in luck in 2021; Memoirs of a Geisha will go public sometime in the early 2100s.
[Via Vidiot's brand new blog.]
posted on Aug 27, 2003 - View this thread

"On Liberty" (1859), John Stuart Mill's classic, is all over the Web, says this article in Salon. "It stands to reason that the Net would embrace Mill, and not only because his text is now in the public domain: The Internet is the vastest marketplace of ideas that mankind has yet managed to create. It's an unbounded and still growing embodiment of Mill's ideals."
posted on Aug 12, 2003 - View this thread

The Mutopia Project and the Choral Public Domain Library are repositories of public domain music in a variety of sheet music formats and sometimes MIDI performances.
posted on Aug 4, 2003 - View this thread

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 on Jun 16, 2003 - View this thread

Creative Commons license: could it force you to suffer for your users' sins? Dan Bricklin says the liability clauses could do just that. MonkeyX says the benefits outweigh the risks. The Commoners respond. Ming the Mechanic and others prefer an alternative scheme: Primarily Public Domain, in which all content is donated to the public domain by default unless otherwise specified. And then there's plain old-fashioned copyright, like MeFi. How do you limit the incorporation of your cyberself?
posted on May 22, 2003 - View this thread

Left Gets Nod from Right on Copyright Law - A darling of the conservative movement, federal Judge Richard Posner criticizes the Sonny Bono Act and attacks the Patent and Trademark Office for granting "very questionable" business method patents at a lecture organized by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. (via How Appealing)
posted on Nov 21, 2002 - View this thread

What do Margaret Mitchell , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , George Orwell & Adolf Hitler have in common - other than that they are authors? [Answer inside]
posted on Oct 23, 2002 - View this thread