Making the public domain more accessible

I’ve always been interested in public domain content as a way of reducing cost for students and also as a fertile ground to build new content. I thought that I was in the loop when it came to copyright-expired content. Seems I missed a couple of very interesting developments.

First of all, there’s a public domain registry in Canada that’s under development. The news release [PDF] came out March 3rd, 2006 and I only heard of it through Michael Geist’s site recently. The site is dedicated to helping people figure out whether a published work is still within or has fallen out of copyright protection. It leaves cataloguing content that was released as public domain to sites such as archive.org.

Second, the Boston Public Library will scan any book they have and send the scanned copy to you within seven days. They’ll even use optical character recognition (imperfect, but still) to send you a plaintext copy. They call the service scan-on-demand.

The public domain registry is something that I’m happy to see. Figuring out copyright status is something that’s complicated operations at Project Gutenberg Canada for a while, and now they’re getting support of Access Copyright. Glad to see a rights organization help out for the public good. The scan-on-demand feature is something I’d never even dreamed of but sounds extremely cool and goes hand in hand with the public domain registry when sourcing content.