This summer, I bought a new laptop, and, because it was so hot upstairs, I started working downstairs on the more portable laptop computer. I also found myself consuming more media–specifically movies–on the laptop. I’m a fan of old movies, and I found a wealth of free, public domain movies to watch online, through sites such as Archive.org.
Then it struck me; if I was hungrily looking for public domain content for my laptop, how about all the other people with electronic book readers, music players, and mobile electronics? Anecdotally, it seems to me that people are taking to classic, public domain work with new enthusiasm. Sure, we’ve long had public domain books available online, but now, they look better (and are easier to curl up on the couch with) than before. Movies from the ’30s, with their grainy images, may not look great on a big screen TV, but on a portable device, classics fueled by smart, speedy dialogue stand up fabulously!
How about you? Have you been investigating public domain art? Why? What are some of your best sources?
Original Image by Tom Maisey
Ever since I started reading on e-book readers in 1999 on my Palm PDA, I have been reading primarily public domain books from Gutenberg! it wasn't until I got my Kindle that I bought new books!
It doesn't always need to be old. I was happy to submit one of my music projects to the Internet Archive not very long ago. Not only is the data safe for the long run, it even helped me save on bandwidth charges for all the big-size FLAC files. It felt great, man.
With all the copyright worries these days, I'm sort of worried that the public domain will get stalled or end up in arrested development within the 01920's. Copyright duration just keeps getting longer and longer in most parts of the world, and a lot of old films are at real risk of disintegration. Without things entering public domain, it'll be too expensive to save them. Just think of all the possible history we'll lose.
That's an excellent point, about the extension of copyright, MW. You might be interested in James Boyle's excellent and entirely reasonable book, The Public Domain: http://www.thepublicdomain.org/
It's available for purchase as a book, or as a free download.
I agree with your point here about the history we could lose. Back in 2005, Katrina almost took out much of our culture when it hit New Orleans. That city was where much of the jazz and blues we listened to over the past century originated.
What memories the public domain archives bring back. There are plenty of reasons to use public domain material, many of them having to do with the marketability of the material, not just the copyright.
Unlike Creative Commons, material placed into the public domain when the original author/creator decides that there is no marketability for the work, and also decides not to renew the copyright.
Note: IBM did this with operating system software written back in the 1970s. Links to the software can be found at the OS/360 and OS/370 archive at ibiblio.org.
The Hercules 390 application can be used to emulate a IBM System 390 on your laptop or desktop, so you can run software from that archive.
ibiblio.org is also an archive for everything GNU.
One of the antiquated aspects of the Berne convention (WIPO treaty #1 that Canada has been under since the 1880's and the USA finally joined in the 1970's) is that formalities were not allowed. That means there is no such thing as "decides not to renew the copyright" (A currently outdated US concept that didn't apply to Canada).
The reality is that there is far more works where the copyright holders are unlocatable and licensing is impossible than works still under copyright where licensing is required.
The more people recognise the value of the public domain, the more we can try to modernise these laws (and even more antiquated WIPO treaties). The idea of not requiring registration pre-dates computers (or recording devices for that matter). It should be obvious that requiring registration in the digital age is easy and benefits everyone: it makes it easier to locate a copyright holder to pay them, and easier to know when a work is no longer under copyright so we can all build upon it.
Not surprising, Copyright Bill C-32 heads the opposite direction of obfuscating the term of copyright in a few places *sigh* (recordings of audio and images). The right solution is to harmonise copyright on all recordings to being a fixed number of years from when the recording was made. http://billc32.ca/faq#photographers
I like public domain works on new devices as well. While I don't have an e-reading device, I have taken several software applications for a test drive by pointing them to public domain works from sources such as Project Gutenberg. It's easy to find Huck Finn, for example, and see how it looks/feels/reads in multiple applications.
In education, I'd like to see us moving more in this direction. Much of the literature we teach in high school is decades old. Why not use the e-versions of the Shakespeare plays or the Canterbury Tales instead of buying new literature textbooks?
I also share the fear that the idea of "public domain" may be endangered. Certainly in the United States, and, from what I understand, in Canada as well, copyright laws have kept work under protection far longer than it was in previous generations. Mickey Mouse is still under copyright more than 80 years after his introduction. The more we lock down the intellectual property rights, the more easily we'll lose those parts of our culture.
I like the idea of the Gutenberg project and other archives, but really, if you look at what is on the GP, there is very little of interest. Occasionally you will get obscure works by famous writers of the past, such as Defoe et al, but generally it is the detritus of an age gone by, scintillating work such as the most popular work, "How to Analyze People on Sight Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types" by that team of thinkers of great renown, Elsie Lincoln Benedict and her BFF Ralph Paine Benedict…2nd most popular book there? The Kamasutra. It just is not useful.