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Open Library continues despite BL lack of support

Public Domain Works, an open registry of artistic works in the public domain, is going to join up with the Open Library.

The project, which is a joint initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, the Open Rights Group and Free Culture UK, has data representing thousands of artists and works. This data will be uploaded to the Open Library, and will be accessible via web services which will show which works are out of copyright in different jurisdictions.

Public Domain Works http://www.publicdomainworks.net
The Open Library http://demo.openlibrary.org/

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This is useful to learn

This is useful to learn about.

I know from experience that if material is public domain, derivative works will be created from it, whereas this is not the case for material where there is some copyright link. It could be suggested that the internet itself owes much of its existence to the 1st January 1923 copyright 'horizon' in the USA, before which every text is out of copyright.

So we need to encourage public domain status for material where, realistically, there is little or no commercial value.