Sunday, April 2 2006
There is a wealth of content and other information in the public domain that is or soon will be in an ebook or some sort of digital form. What information is in the public domain? Any content with no current copyright or patent and no laws which restrict its use by the public is part of the public domain and can be used and distributed freely by anyone. For a book to be a part of the public domain, it must meet all of these conditions: first published before January 1, 1923, the author must have died at least 70 years before January 1 of the current year, no perpetual copyright has been passed and no copyright term extension has been passed for the work. Any content created by the US government is also part of the public domain, for example NASA photos and census data. A large collection (over 13,000) of public domain books have been indexed and made available in digital format at
http://pdbooksonline.com/books/.
There are some who think copyright protection should be extended. This would remove many works from the public domain. For more information, see
Opposing Copyright Extension and help protect the public domain.
