Release The Music

Public domain resources and projects

PD Burn
A Free Culture UK project which aims to build a database of public domain works, locate copies of PD works and then digitise them.
http://www.freeculture.org.uk/PublicDomainBurn

CHARM
A project of Kings College, London, which is developing a major online discography of 78rpm recordings issued by the Gramophone Company (HMV).
http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/

British Library’s Sound Archive
A major new online resource available free to everyone in Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) which provides easy access to thousands of hours of rare and historic sound recordings.
http://sounds.bl.uk/

Cylinder Preservation and Digitisation Project
Free digital access to 6000 cylinder recordings at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture.
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

European Archive
1500 Classical LPs, freely available in digital form.
http://www.europarchive.org/

Choral Public Domain Library
http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

PD Info
An American reference site to help identify public domain songs and public domain music in the US.
http://www.pdinfo.com/

Wikimedia
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Music_sound

Links specific to articles specific to term extension

Eldred amicus brief
The oft-referenced Eldred amici curiae brief, a rare example of independent analysis on the economics of term extension.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/eldredvashcroft/supct/amici/economists.pdf

Extending the Term
Should the UK recording industry have new obligations as well as new rights if the copyright term for sound recordings is extended?
By Ben Challis.
http://www.musiclawupdates.com/articles/ARTICLE%2006extendingtheterm.htm

Public domain and social-production

The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain
By James Boyle.
http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/boyle.pdf

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
By Yochai Benkler (Yale Press 2006).
http://www.benkler.org/wonchapters.html

Academic resources for study of the public domain

Lawrence Lessig
Pre-eminent public intellectual in terms of intellectual property and the digital age.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/

Yochai Benkler
Leading US-based academic in this field.
http://www.benkler.org/Pub.html

Jamie Boyle
US-based British academic.
http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/Boylebio.html

Mapping the Digital Public Domain
By Pamela Samuelson.
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp/articles/lcp66dWinterSpring2003p147.htm

Nine Tenths of the Law: The English Copyright Debates and the Rhetoric of the Public Domain
By Mark Rose.
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp/articles/lcp66dWinterSpring2003p75.htm

Reimagining the Public Domain
By David Lange.
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp/downloads/LCP66DWinterSpring2003P463.pdf

Should Auld Copyrights Be Forgot? Commentary on the Public Domain
By Sam Williams.
http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCopyrightExtension/publicdomain/Williams12-22-99.html

Duke Law School’s history and theory of the public domain
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/history.html

Duke Law School’s public domain related arts projects
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/artsproject/

Washinton State University’s page on Public Domain Resources
http://publishing.wsu.edu/copyright/public_domain_resources/

General resources

The UK Copyright Service
Provides copyright registration for original works by writers, musicians, artists, designers, software providers, authors, companies, organisations and individuals; and provides information about copyright.
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/

Own-It
The Creative London Intellectual Property Service, for general information on intellectual property.
http://www.own-it.org

The Golden Pages
Links for musicians on the WWW (provided by Royal Holloway, University of London).
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Music/Golden-pages/

Mutopia
All music in the Mutopia Project is free to download, print out, perform and distribute.
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/

Open Business
Entrepreneurial ideas built around openness, free services and free access.
http://www.openbusiness.cc/

Courtney Love does the math
The singer’s take on record label profits, Napster and ’sucka VCs’.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/

Howard Hope Phonographs & Gramophones
The place to purchase phonograms and gramophones!
http://www.gramophones.uk.com/