AUTHOR CREDIT AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
Even though it may not be legally required in every country, and especially in those countries where moral rights do not exist after the term of copyright expires, there are many benefits to identifying and giving credit to the original creators, even after their work has entered the public domain. Many communities have adopted norms, which are accepted standards for crediting the authors and the treatment of works in the public domain. Creative Commons has created public domain guidelines that can be used by communities to create their own norms. You can review the CC guidelines at https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Guidelines. Can you think of a reason why it might be helpful to give credit to an author whose work is in the public domain? Can you think of why norms should be encouraged when public domain works are reused?
FINDING WORKS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
With millions of creative works whose copyright has expired—and many more added regularly with tools like the CC0 Public Domain Dedication—the public domain is a vast treasure trove of content.
Among the sites that host works in the public domain are Project Gutenberg, Public Domain Review, Digital Public Library of America, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, Flickr, and the Rijksmuseum. The CC Search tool (https://search.creativecommons.org/) is another way to find public domain material.
It is not always easy to identify whether a work is in the public domain (though there are many resources available to help). As we learned, copyright protection is automatic, so the absence of the copyright symbol “©” does not mean a work is in the public domain. In addition to its CC0 Public Domain Dedication for creators, Creative Commons also has a tool called the Public
! NOTE A work that is in the public domain for purposes of copyright law may still be subject to other intellectual property restrictions. For example, a story that is in the public domain may have a trademarked brand on the cover associated with the publisher of the book. Trademark protection is independent of copyright protection and may still exist even though the work is in the public domain as a matter of copyright. Also, once a creator uses a public domain work to turn it into a new work, the creator will have copyright on the portions of their new work that are original to them. As an example, the creator of a film adaptation based on a novel in the public domain will have copyright protection over the film, but not the underlying novel.
