The Public Domain Works DB is an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. It is focused on sound recordings (and their underlying compositions) because a term extension for sound recordings is currently being considered in Europe.
In the future it will will expand to cover all types of cultural works which are covered by copyright. The DB is a joint project of Free Culture UK and the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Rights Group.
We are extremely grateful to Philip Harper for donating his composer data to the Public Domain and for allowing us to use his book and author data from the New General Catalog of Books and Authors (there is also a dedicated search interface). We are also very grateful to the BBC archives for giving their CAIRNS and GRAMS catalogue data to us.
The code for this site is licensed under an MIT license and is available via our KnowledgeForge project.
The content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (by-sa) license v2.5.
The data contained on this site is licensed under v0.9 (or any later version) of the Open Database License with the exception of any data listed as coming from the NGCOBA (this data is Mr Harper's). A full data dump will be made available soon. In the mean time full information on where data was sourced from and code for processing it can be found in our code base liste above.
You can find out more information about the project on the main site including a guide to copyright and the public domain and details on how to get involved in the project.