Where can I get more information on the public domain and copyright?
A very useful guide on the legalities of putting books online in the US is Mary Minow’s Library Digitization Projects and Copyright. It’s written by a lawyer and librarian, and goes into more detail on many of the issues discussed here. If you would like more information on the public domain, a new (offline) book by Stephen Fishman, called The Public Domain: How to Find Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art and More (Nolo Press, 2000) is a useful guide to finding and using public domain works, and goes into much more detail than is possible on a single Web page like this one. Here is the publisher’s information page on the current edition. For questions on other aspects of copyright law that aren’t answered on the Web, newsgroup misc.int-property may be a good place to ask. The PIJIP-Copyright forum (formerly CNI-COPYRIGHT) is a mailing list with a number of copyright experts on it. I have also found the following (offline) books helpful for more complicated legal questions on copyright.
