Amsterdam, 26 July 2011

(by Daniel Dietrich)

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.

As part of the EuropeanaConnect project the public domain calculators have been developed to answer the question whether a certain work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights (related rights) has fallen into the public domain. These public domain Calculators have been developed for 30 countries (the European Union plus Switzerland, Iceland & Norway) and are available at www.outofcopyright.eu

Users can use the calculators (and the underlying research published at outofcopyright.eu) to determine the copyright status of works in all these countries. This is the first time that this question has been structurally researched across all European jurisdictions.

Outofcopyright continues to adjust and refine its calculators. It is also researching how to make calculation possible using large datasets like bibliographica, DBPedia and the Europeana datasets on cultural objects in Europe.

The Public Domain Calculator is a research product of EuropeanaConnect and executed by Knowledgeland and the Institute for information Law at the University of Amsterdam.