[pd-discuss] Announcement: outofcopyright.eu launched

Wed May 4 10:21:50 UTC 2011

We are proud to announce that we have now launched www.outofcopyright.eu. The site is part of the Europeana project developing Public Domain Calculators. Outofcopyright.eu presents research done by the Institute of Information Law and Knowledgeland to help consumers of content to determine whether a work is still protected by copyright or not. Consumers of content in principle have the right to use works which are in the public domain without permission and with no copyright restrictions. In practice however determining if a work has passed into the public domain can often prove difficult. This is especially true when attempting to determine the public domain status of content in multiple jurisdictions. The Public Domain Calculators available on the site answer the question of whether a certain work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights (related rights) has fallen into the public domain in a given European country.

The Public Domain Calculators are intended to assist Europeana with this problem through a simple interface between the user and the often complex set of national rules governing the term of protection. The issue is of significance for Europeana, as contributing organisations will be expected to clearly mark the material in their collection as being in the public domain, through the attachment of a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark, whenever possible.

On the website you can use the Calculators, explore the research behind the Calculators, and embed the Calculators in your own projects. At the moment only 13 out of what will be a total of 30 Calculators are operational, but we will be adding the rest in the coming weeks as they are completed. 

We would like to thank everyone on the list who participated in the effort of making this research possible.

Visit outofcopyright.eu, see our flowcharts and calculator software. All resources are available under an open content/open source license. Feel free to contact us with any questions or remarks.

Best,

Maarten Zeinstra, Kennisland
Christina Angelopoulos, Institute for Information Law

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