OutOfCopyright.eu was developed to answer the question whether copyright or similar rights in a work have expired. In 2011 we did extensive comparative legal research on this subject which resulted in several papers and 30 public domain calculators. Today we are launching a brand new site with new research and new functionality.

Contrary to popular believe copyright and similar rights did not stand still since that time. A new EU-directive and changes to local legislation called for an update of our calculators. However maintainability of the decision structures of our old website proved difficult. Instead of adjusting our previous platform we’ve decided to start fresh with a more flexible platform.

This technological update means that we now need to recreate our calculators. This will take some time and on launch there will only be a couple of jurisdictions available. We’ve archived our old platform here, this platform will remain fully functional and accessible.

Check out our new calculators here.

Visual Editor

A new visual editor has been developed to create generic decision processes in the form of decision trees. This enables law scholars and researcher to create their own decision trees. These easy to maintain flowcharts allows for multiple-choice questions and question based on numerical input. A formula builder breaks down complex decisions into manageable questions. For example “Did the last surviving author die within 70 years of publication?” becomes “In what year did the last surviving author die?” and “In what year was the work published?”. Our tools greatly simplifies the questions necessary for a determination of the rights status of a work.

APIs

Each decision process is automatically available through an Application Programming Interface (API). This allows developers and other platforms to easily integrate a calculator into their own platforms. Our RESTful JSON API only requires a minimal set of metadata to determine the rights status of a work and generates useful error reports that allows you to finely comb through your collection and determine the rights status of a work where available and get feedback on what information is still lacking to determine the status of a work.

New Research

OutOfCopyRight.eu not only has a new design, but a whole new section dedicated to digitisation in the cultural sector. When museums, archives, galleries and libraries digitise their collections, they are often unsure if new rights are created during the digitisation process itself: if an analog work that is in the public domain is digitised, is the digital work also in the public domain? And how about a copyright protected work?

These are complex questions and there is no straightforward answer. Based on an in-depth comparative research (forthcoming) carried out by Thomas Margoni from the Institute for Information Law, we designed interactive maps that provide provisional answers to these questions. We look at three different methods of digitisation and show if new rights are created during each digitisation process, per jurisdiction.

We can use your help

If you want to help creating public domain calculators for your own country, create your own decision process or have feedback for us, please mail us hello@outofcopyright.eu