4.3 The Public Domain and Why Remixing Matters

The Public Domain: Out of Copyright

Public domain materials come with no copyright restrictions! They include:

• Anything published before 1929 (as of 2024).
• Many things published between 1929 and 1989. Copyright status can be difficult to determine for materials from this time period. See this chart from Cornell for more details.
• Content created by employees of the U.S. federal government and its agencies (CDC, NIH, DOJ, USDA, etc.) in the line of their work. Be cautious when federally funded materials have personal names or other institutions listed as well. These may not be clearly in the public domain. Check with your research support person if you’re not sure.

Using Public Domain Materials Critically and in Context

Just because a work is not copyrighted does not mean it is credible or appropriate. Older works and government publications should include appropriate context, criticism, and commentary.  Here are three examples of when you might use public domain materials:

Federal Agency Data

Federal agencies like the FBI and the Census Bureau are often cited as primary sources of criminal justice and demographic statistics. These agencies’ publications, including charts and reports, are in the public domain. But it’s also important to note the limitations of these sources. You might include alternative projects like Mapping Police Violence, as well as critiques of government data, like this article from ProPublica on mislabeling hate crimes.

Images of Historic People and Events

Images created before 1928 are in the public domain. Elizabeth Pearce and student contributors to Contemporary Families remixed two texts in their chapter on “Working Outside of the System: Social Movements and Activism” and included public domain images of key historic people and events, including a portrait of journalist Ida B. Wells (Figure 4.1).

Public Domain Illustrations

In addition to photographs and charts, many projects are also including illustrations. Many illustrators have dedicated their works to the public domain through a CC0 mark, including Pablo Stanley, creator of OpenPeeps. There are no legal restrictions on remixing or creating new works using public domain images.  This is an important right for educators, which we’ll discuss in the next section.

Legally, you don’t need to attribute public domain materials, but, of course, attribution or citation is important for other reasons, including:

• Avoiding plagiarism. Even if a creator is no longer living, or is a government employee, giving credit is the right and professional thing to do.
• Being credible. Students are taught to Investigate the Source as part of college information literacy programs. Providing source information, where possible, bolsters your credibility and helps curious readers dive deeper.
• Tracking it down later. Keeping records of your sources also helps you. Sometimes you can use Google’s Reverse Image Search to track down an image source, but not always. It’s also way more time-consuming than attributing sources right away!

We’ll discuss how to attribute public domain materials in more detail in section 4.5, or you can see examples in the Attributions Style Guide.

Anyone can dedicate their work (if they hold the copyright, i.e., didn’t make it for an employer or transfer it to a publisher) to the public domain by applying the CC0 mark. Why would someone want to give their work away for free, without requiring attribution? Because sometimes that’s the most responsible or effective way to share a resource. For example, many researchers put their data in the public domain because data are often not copyrightable, anyway (see box). It can also be cumbersome to attribute when working with massive numbers of data sets. Retaining at least the right to attribution with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license is more common for authors of books, articles, and images.

How Copyright Affects Remixing

The Five Rs

The adaptability and reusability of OER make it so that they are not just free to access, but also free for instructors who want to alter the materials for use in their course. Remember The Hewlett Foundation’s definition of OER: “Teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” [emphasis added]. We’ve just discussed the public domain, and the next section will cover open licenses like Creative Commons.

One of the tenets of OER laid out early on in the open education movement was the idea of the 5 Rs (originally the 4 Rs) introduced by David Wiley (2014).  These five attributes lay out what it means for something to be truly “open,” as the term is used in open education. The 5 Rs include:

• Retain = the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.
• Reuse = the right to use the content in a wide range of ways
• Revise = the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix = the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new
• Redistribute = the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others

Each of these five rights plays an important role in the usefulness of an open educational resource.  For example, without the right to remix materials, an instructor would not be able to combine two different OER into a new resource that more closely fits their needs. The right to revise is particularly important from an equity perspective, as discussed in Module 2: Textbook Revision.

Each of the 5 Rs are the exclusive right of the copyright holder unless a work is in the public domain or openly licensed. In the next section, we’ll look at Creative Commons licenses and how they facilitate the expression of the 5 Rs in unique ways. It’s important to understand the different kinds of licenses because not all Creative Commons licenses allow revising and remixing.

Watch the video below (Figure 4.3) for a short, clear overview of how copyright and licensing led to the need for open licenses like Creative Commons, which we’ll discuss next.

References

Wiley, David.  (2014). Defining the ‘open’ in open content and open educational resources. Open Content blog. http://opencontent.org/definition