With the UK Government considering yet another extension of copyright, demonstrating the value of the public domain is a hot topic for free culture advocates. When the copyright expires on creative works they enter the "public domain", a digital wild west with no legal restrictions on their use. The public domain illustrates a classic free culture dilemna: the absence of restrictions is useful, but the ability to get hold of a copy is equally important, and it's difficult to claim you have much creative freedom without both.

Luckily for us, many national libraries keep extensive archives of creative works. Now Free Culture UK, a grassroots network of local and national projects, is spearheading an initative called Public Domain Burn to rectify this situation. The plan is to make digital copies of public domain works readily available on the internet, just as Project Gutenberg has done with texts.

The project has two distinct phases. First they want to build a registry of works held by public institutions, with enough metadata to programatically determine their copyright status in Europe. Just to achieve this, FC-UK had to undertake research to be sure of the legal algorithms involved. At the time of writing the registry has incomplete data for 137 works from 1900.

The registry itself also serves a useful purpose. Iaccessories-text-editor.pngt can be difficult to work out if a recording in your posession is in the public domain, and so fair game for a remix. When DJ Haircut Boy posted a drum & bass remix of Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag on Remix Reading's web site, we had to do the legwork ourselves to be sure that he could legally distribute a remix of the jazz classic. Public Domain Works (PDW), being developed in partnership with the Open Knowledge Foundation, will be a huge help for musicians without major legal departments behind them.

The PDW registry is currently being built by screen-scraping the British Library's online catalogue, then dumping the imperfect metadata into the database. A wiki interface has been set-up that allows volunteers to browse, correct and expand the available metadata.

Once the PDW project nears completion, or at least has enough complete data to make digitisation practical, FC-UK hope to begin making high-quality copies of the old '78 records - "burning" the public domain. This is actually quite tricky, given that the records are fragile and need special equipment to play well. Getting a decent recording will require time and money, something that FC-UK doesn't have a lot of.

So the plan is to run a series of small, catchy sub-projects that will attract funding. One idea is to take out adverts in classical and jazz music enthusaists magazines, inviting people to pledge a small amount of money. In return they'll receive a certificate saying that they brought a particular piece of music into the digital commons.

The resulting music won't just be of interest to remixers. Cleaning up the recordings will also present a challenge to archivists, and a large pool of material for audio filter developers to experiment on. Audio applications could ship with a library of samples; games could mix the sounds for effects; even desktop environments could benefit from elegant sound themes.

According to Rob Myers of FC-UK, the project is also an effective protest tool in the fight against copyright extensions. The UK government is currently considering extending the term of what are called mechanical copyrights from 50 to 95 years throughout the EU, in line with US law. Mechanical copyrights cover the recordings (as opposed to the composition, for which a creator gets a term of their life plus 70 years).

Myers points out that the value of the public domain recordings goes beyond the uses it might have for creators and developers - "it is a way of opening people's eyes to what they will stand to lose if the recording industry get the ridiculous copyright extensions they are lobbying for."

So what does the future hold for the project? As with any self-respecting free culture project, Public Domain Burn really needs your help. The PDW software is fairly basic, and a little attention from some talented programmers could help build a really flashy and functional registry; the greater the "wow" factor, the more effective the project is as a protest, and the more inviting it is to creators.

If you're not a code monkey, or if you've got enough of that on your plate, there's plenty of grunt work in correcting and expanding the metadata. Simply visit the PDW web site, create an account and start editing the pages as you would with any other wiki. Budding internet researchers will find plenty to do in tracing the biographical details of composers and performers.

Once the Public Domain Works registry is up and running, and the digitisation phase is steaming ahead, Free Culture UK will be able to bring thousands of hours of copyright-free music to consumers and musicians.

This article was published in issue 69 of Linux User & Developer.