LibGuides: Copyright and Fair Use: Public Domain

Public Domain

What is meant by the term Public Domain? According to Plagiarism.org, "the term Public Domain has a very specific meaning. In short, it is used to denote works that have no copyright protection, meaning that they can be used freely without permission from the creator or another rightsholder ... most content on the Internet is NOT public domain ... Whether a work is in the public domain deals only with its copyright status. That determines whether you can copy and distribute the work. It says nothing about your ethical obligations to cite and attribute it ... even if the content you're using is actually in the public domain, you still need to cite. The rules of plagiarism and citation apply just as much to works in the public domain as they do [to] works still under copyright" (Turnitin, LLC, 2018).

Public Domain Day (PDD) is an observance of when copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain. This legal transition of copyright works into the public domain usually happens every year on January 1 based on the individual copyright laws of each country. … Public Domain Day in 2019 was significant in the United States as it was the first to have any meaningful copyright expirations there since the event's establishment: a 20-year freeze had been imposed in 1998 with the passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Below are four places to search for works in the public domain.

Google Books
For users in the U.S., Google Books currently treats all books published after 1922 as protected by copyright, except for books to which no copyright was ever attached, such as books authored by the U.S. government. For users outside the U.S., we make determinations based on appropriate local law. As with all of our decisions related to the Google Books content, we're conservative in our reading of both copyright law and the known facts surrounding a particular book. If we don't know for sure, you'll see the Snippet View which, like a card catalog, shows you information about the book plus a few snippets – a few sentences of your search term in context.
Hathi Trust Digital Library
Hathi Trust Digital Library includes both copyrighted and public domain materials. According to the Welcome to HathiTrust! webpage, “ Hathi Trust preserves and provides lawful access to the 17+ million digitized items.”
Internet Archive
The archive contains billions of web pages and millions of books, texts, audio recordings, videos, images, and software programs.
Project Gutenberg
According to Project Gutenberg Permissions, Licensing and other Common Requests webpage: “The vast majority of Project Gutenberg eBooks are in the public domain in the US. This means that nobody can grant, or withhold, permission to do with this item as you please.”