[P2P-F] OutOfCopyright.eu makes Public Domain Calculators available for the entire European Union

[Franco Iacomella]

OutOfCopyright.eu <http://OutOfCopyright.eu/> makes Public Domain
Calculators available for the entire European Union

Works that have fallen into the public domain after their term of
copyright protection has elapsed can be freely used by everybody. In
theory that means that these works can be reused by anyone for any
purpose which includes commercial exploitation. In theory the public
domain status increases access to our shared knowledge and culture and
encourages economic activities that do not take place as long as works
are protected by copyright. In turn the commercial exploitation of
public domain works (for example out of copyright books
<http://www.voyantes.net/blog/?p=589>) has the tendency to increase
their accessibility.

In practice however determining if a work has passed into the public
domain can prove very difficult. This is especially true when attempting
to determine the public domain status of content in multiple
jurisdictions. As part of the EuropeanaConnect project
<http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/> Knowledgeland
<http://www.knowledgeland.org/> and the Institute for information Law at
the University of Amsterdam <http://www.ivir.nl/> have developed public
domain calculators to answer the question whether a certain work or
other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights
(related rights) has fallen into the public domain. These public domain
Calculators have been developed for 30 countries (the European Union
plus Switzerland, Iceland & Norway) and are available at
www.outofcopyright.eu <http://www.outofcopyright.eu/>

Users can use the calculators (and the underlying research
<http://outofcopyright.eu/methodology.html> published at
outofcopyright.eu <http://outofcopyright.eu/>) to determine the
copyright status of works in all these countries. This is the first time
that this question has been structurally researched across all European
jurisdictions.

The results of this research of national copyright laws shows a complex
semi-harmonized field of legislation across Europe that makes it
unnecessarily difficult to unlock the cultural, social and economic
potential of works in the public domain. Identification of works as
being in the public domain needs be made easier and less resource
consuming by simplifying and harmonizing rules of copyright duration and
territoriality.

Outofcopyright continues to adjust and refine its calculators. It is
also researching how to make calculation possible using large datasets
like bibliographica <http://bibliographica.org/>, DBPedia
<http://dbpedia.org/> and the Europeana
<http://www.europeana-libraries.eu/web/api> datasets on cultural objects
in Europe.

We encourage everyone interested in the public domain to try the
calculators, comment on them and re-use the published research. All
research and other material on Outofcopyright is available under the
terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/> and the software
<http://www.outofcopyright.eu/software_description.html> powering the
calculators can be reused under the terms of the EUPL license
<http://www.osor.eu/eupl>

Kind regards,

Maarten Zeinstra


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