Celebrate Public Domain Day!
Copyright law is at best, quite complicated. Educating students about these complexities can be quite challenging. When asked if they can use "something," the answer is almost always, "it depends." Discussions about Creative Commons licensing, fair use, and plagiarism and appropriation abound. With public domain material, it's a pleasure to be able to just say "YES!"On the other hand, the journey of how works become part of the public domain collection is not always simple. Before 1998, in the United States, works 75 years or older graduated into the public domain. In 1998, President Clinton extended that term by 20 years, effectively cancelling Public Domain Day for 20 years.This year we can celebrate the release of music, film, literature, and other works of art from 1926—including Winnie-the-Pooh. Finding work in the public domain can also be a bit complicated. Multiple sources exist. Wikipedia Commons, Europeana, Library of Congress, and many museums are among them. A good place to get started is The Public Domain Review.Enjoy the journey!Source:https://hyperallergic.com/703299/celebrate-public-domain-day-2022/
Yale launches "Open Access" policy
Yale University has announced open access to online images of millions of objects housed in their museums, archives, and libraries. With their new policy they are also the first Ivy League university to make high quality digital images of their vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available.Yale's collections are among the strongest in depth and breadth of any academic institution in the world.Meg Bellinger, director of the Yale Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI) says that increased access to high-quality content and new linked data technologies will revolutionize the way people search and relate to cultural objects.View a sampling of their collection in this Open Access Slideshow.Source: http://news.yale.edu/2011/05/10/digital-images-yale-s-vast-cultural-collections-now-available-free