Open access, Christmas, and public domain
In the summer, we touched on common questions and issues surrounding copyright and licensing in open research, sharing a video featuring all the various Creative Commons licences and conditions one might apply to open access material online.
Something we didn’t explore was public domain. Public domain refers to works that no longer have copyright protection on them. Usually, this is because the duration of copyright has lapsed.
In the UK, the duration of copyright depends on the type of work. The most common example would be a literary, musical, dramatic or artistic work has copyright protections until 70 years after the author’s death, though the UK government does provide a helpful set of tables listing specific durations to consider.
However, there are other ways of placing material as much as possible in the public domain—that is, without dying. If the rights holder decides to waive their interests or said rights entirely, without restriction or the need for attribution, then this can be signaled by applying the CC0 licence.
This licence, however, is relatively rare in its application, so if there are materials you like but can’t access because it isn’t yet in the paywall, then you may simply have to wait.
However, there are many items in the public domain, and since Christmas is fast approaching, we thought we’d point to some of the public domain materials out there, free gifts awaiting you on the internet!
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens died in 1870, 155 years ago. This means all his work is now in the public domain, free to use and adapt as one might wish, and ‘tis the season to go back to some of his holiday-oriented stories, including his most famous, A Christmas Carol.
This short novella initially was published in 1843, and since then has had copious amounts of editions and adaptations done. Once material is the public domain, people can riff and adapt works wildly, something we’ve seen done many times before, particularly with this story. My own personal favourite is The Muppets’ Christmas Carol (which, to be clear, is not in the public domain), though the earliest film adaptation may be this one from 1901.
The novella, though, can be found online for free at Project Gutenberg, an online platform for literary works in the public domain.
If you prefer print, though, you can always check the library, which has a few different editions, including this one from Penguin that features many of Dickens’ other Christmas books as well.
It’s important, though, to note that copyright exists for both the content of a work and in the typographical arrangement of an edition.
So while the text and story of A Christmas Carol is in the public domain, any printed or published version of it, has its own copyright, as does any other adaptation, including films, plays, musicals or any other creative media, many of which have their own duration of copyright.
Christmas carols
Many Christmas carols are in the public domain, given their authors have long since passed. The University Collections blog has posted a few traditional Christmas carols as part of this year’s Advent Calendar which would be in the public domain, but the recordings of which—as opposed to the music and sheet music—are not.
The US-based UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, however, has a ton of material, including hundreds of items which have now entered the public domain. You can do a general keyword search for ‘Christmas’ and get many recordings by bands like the Indestructible Military Band, the Edison Concert Band, and others. As the site says on its Copyright and Licensing page, ‘all cylinder recordings made prior to December 31, 1922 are now in the public domain in the United States and many places elsewhere.’
That said, the MP3 files you download from that site are not public domain, but available through a CC BY-NC licence. Check it out for an aural trip back in time!
Fine art for the holidays
Several museums and art galleries have developed open access policies that makes all images of public domain work in their collections available under the CC0 licence.
For example, you can find this painting, by Francis William Edmonds in 1851, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. An image of it, though, is also available on the Met’s website, available for use, re-use, and whatever else under a CC0 licence.
There are many other images available on the Met’s website, along with several other peer institutions online.
Whether you like literature, music, fine art, or cinema, there are public domain items (and even CC0 representations) everywhere, if you just know where to look. Over the next few weeks, as you take a break, I encourage you to explore these open access gifts, freely available to all.
Happy Christmas folks!