If you enter 5 bookshops in your locality that have the book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill in stock, chances are that you will see 2 or 3 versions of the book by different Nigerian publishers.
Don’t get it twisted, the publishers didn’t pay for rights to publish the books, and they keep all the profit for themselves.
How is this possible? How can a Nigerian just wake up one day and decide to publish and market as his own a bestselling book written by an American author without first seeking permission?
Relax, it’s just the awesome power of the public domain at work and it’s so simple any dummy can make it their primary source of income.
Let’s take for instance the book ‘Think And Grow Rich’. Armed with the knowledge you will gather from this article, you can download and resell the book as an eBook, give it away free, or even decide to publish the hard copy of the book and put your name on it as the publisher.
Such is the power of public domain materials.
So, what exactly is public domain and how do you know if something falls within your rights to use it?
The term Public Domain is a phrase coined to describe the huge body of works in the form of written books, courses, articles, images, films, and all sorts of other intellectual properties that have for one reason or another lapsed from copyright protection, meaning that we as individuals can take them and use them in anyway we see fit both legally and morally for the purposes of repackaging the works and selling them for profit.
The version of the book ‘Think And Grow Rich’ that is in the public domain is the 1st edition published in 1937. The copyright was not renewed on it. Meaning that there may be some other versions of the same book which are protected by copyright and which you’re not permitted by law to re-publish.
There are many other materials in Public domain that you can claim as your own. You might even have come across some of them or even bought them online and offline without knowing they are in the public domain. They include posters, reports, tv programs, audio recordings, music, plays, manuals of many kinds and much more!
Examples include the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, The King James Bible, most of the early silent films, the formulae of Newtonian physics, and the patents on powered flight.
The literary classics Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid, The Jungle Book, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm — Disney was free to make its beloved animated versions of these books because their copyrights had lapsed, as well as its epic 3D version of Alice in Wonderland (directed by Tim Burton) which had the second-highest box office gross in 2010 and ranks ninth-highest in all-time box office gross.
In 2011, other studios interpreted public domain works to create such films as Romeo & Juliet (Shakespeare), Little Red Riding Hood (Perrault & the Brothers Grimm), and The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas Père).
In the patent realm, drug producers can offer cheaper generic versions of Prilosec or Zoloft, and inventors can improve and market previous innovations, because their patents have expired.
Who benefits from public domain materials?
Artists of all kinds rely on public domain materials— Homer’s The Odyssey has given birth to Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou?, to name only a few.
Journalists and activists use facts and symbols in the public domain to inform the public and spur debate. Commercial publishers reprint public domain works and sell them at discounted prices. Teachers, libraries, museums, historians, archivists, and database operators use the public domain to collect, preserve, and teach about our past.
Scientific and technical research would be impossible without access to data and discoveries. Youth orchestras and church choirs perform public domain works for their communities.
The list goes on. Chances are, you’ve used, enjoyed, and depended on the public domain as well.
So what are the benefits of you using public domain information, or works, to create your own products?
Here are a few ideas to get your mind racing.
* Low start-up costs
* Eliminate paying royalties to others
* Quickly test a market's viability without a large investment
* Save money testing a market before further development
* Low investment of time - time is money
* You keep 100% of the profits!
* No copyright fees
* Thousands of works already exist you can use starting today
* Prior success of works usually is an indicator of future success, i.e., Grimm Fairy Tales!
As you can see the possibilities of using public domain for profits are limited only by your imagination.
The question should not be: "Can I start a profitable business using public domain?" but rather, “Are YOU prepared to do so?”
The public domain sounds really valuable, but I’m in favour of intellectual property, is there a contradiction?
Quite the contrary. You’ll be happy to hear that the public domain is a vital, indispensable part of our intellectual property system, and the inputs in the public domain are just as important to its function as the outputs protected by intellectual property. As Judge Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals put it:
“Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.”
Without the public domain, there would be little to protect with intellectual property rights; if copyright lasted long enough to lock up Shakespeare’s works, much of the literary canon would vanish; if data, theories and formulae were subject to intellectual property protection, then scientific progress would grind to a halt.
So the intellectual property system needs both the incentives provided by exclusive rights and the freedoms provided by the public domain.
How does something become ‘Public Domain’?
To understand the public domain, you must know how any work can potentially fall into the Public Domain. In fact, there are several ways a work can enter the public domain, and some of these are listed below:
- The work was created and published before there were copyright laws: This distinction is very important and is the sole reason why the works of Shakespeare are considered public domain while Darwin’s ground-breaking book, Origin of Species, is protected by copyright.
- The work cannot be copyrighted. This includes things such as ideas, facts, theories, mathematical or scientific formulas, and also simple things like a list of ingredients or components. Therefore you cannot copyright the Theory of Relativity, or the knowledge of how to make a Molotov Cocktail, a type of a home-made bomb (don’t ask us why we know that).
Note: Some copyright laws (for example the US copyright law) forbids certain types of works from being copyrighted. This includes the examples mentioned above, as well as government publications.
- The work is a publication by the government, related agencies and/or officials. Specifically, the US copyright law prevents such publications from being ‘copyrighted’ (this has a lot to do with the definition of copyright and copyrightable work) and thus they are directly part of the public domain.
- The work’s copyright protection has expired (and not been renewed). It is quite possible to find works published as late as 1963 whose copyright has expired and has not been renewed under current copyright laws.
- The work was never copyrighted – This is a tricky issue. Logically, if a person publishing his work does not acquire copyright, then by reason it is automatically part of the public domain.
- The copyright owner dedicated the work to the public domain. This is more common than you think. An often-quoted example is that of freeware software or freely distributed source code. Sometimes artists tend to dedicate their work to the public domain as well. Many bloggers are even donating their writings to the public domain these days!
7 Ways You Can Make Money With Public Domain Works
When it comes to the types of public domain projects you can create, the limit is really your imagination.
Let’s look at seven different ways you can use public domain materials to build an income stream.
- You can republish a public domain book as is. You can either physically print it or offer it in electronic format. If you offer the book in electronic format, packaging it as a PDF file is the best way to go. If you choose to offer a printed book, you have a few options.
You can print it yourself on demand and use inexpensive binding equipment (spiral binding) that you can buy from any office supply store to make a professional looking book. You can go to a local printer and do very short runs of the book. They will even do the binding for you. It will typically be spiral bound at such low volume runs as it is quite cost effective when producing a few dozen at a time.
You can approach a specialty printing company and get a larger quantity printed in any type of binding you want.
- Audiobooks - Did you know that there is a website that has public domain audiobooks that you can download and use as you wish? In fact, as of June 2008, they reached 1,500 books in their catalog of audiobook downloads. There is no cost to use this amazing service. You can learn more about this project at http://librivox.org. Also, don't think you are limited to what is on the Librivox site. Any book in the public domain can be turned into an audio version, packaged and sold to interested customers.
- Stock photograph collections - Creative people of all types are always looking for additional royalty-free stock photo collections that they can use for projects.
With literally millions of photographs in the public domain, you could gather themed groups of photographs and offer them as stock photograph collections to interested customers. You could package these in a variety of ways. The simplest way is to put them on CDs or DVDs and sell them in that format.
But you could also offer a digital download site where people pay for each photograph that they download or a membership site where they pay a one time or monthly fee to access all the photographs in the collection.
- Clip art collections - Clip art is basically line art or simple drawings. As with the stock photograph collections above, clip art collections are very popular and can be delivered in a variety of ways. A great example of using public domain clip art (or really any public domain material) in printed books is Dover Publications. They have a huge catalog of books - republished public domain works and compilations of public domain materials.
- Prints/Posters/Maps - Prints is a very large area of the public domain and with modern printing equipment, you can actually run a highly profitable print shop in your house.
Prints can come in all sizes - anything from postcard size to huge posters - and can be offered on a variety of papers and materials - even canvas. So what can be printed? The list is almost endless. You could print civil war photographs, old maps NASA space mission images, Military images, fine art posters.
You can even combine elements of images and build your own unique images for printing - like a series of motivational posters with moving scenes and motivational quotes blazoned across the top of the poster.
- Have you always wanted to sell e-books but you've never had the time or the ability to sit down and write a great e-book that will be a valuable information product? With public domain ebook, you can take works from the public domain and turn them into profitable e-books that boost your sales and your profits.
You can sell the e-books as is or you can make changes and distribute the improved e-book through your web site. Using public domain works is an easy, inexpensive, and fast way to sell e-books or use them as incentives for your customers.
- Cards - There are a variety of cards that can be made of public domain images. These include postcards, playing cards, flash cards, sports cards, etc. The key to success in the card business is again to theme the cards to an interest that you’ve identified.
For instance, the Library of Congress has a great collection of baseball cards from around 1900 online. An enterprising person could use them to make decks of playing cards and market them during baseball season.
Where And How To Get Domain Materials
If you're going to take advantage of public domain material, you need to know where to find it without a lot of frustration. Below are places you can get public domain products.
There are hundreds of places you can get public domain materials but I will be sharing you some of the best places you can get it and use it to your own advantage.
1. http://www.asksam.com/ebooks - A selection of classic texts like Shakespeare, and assorted legal & governmental texts.
2. http://www.baen.com/library - A library of downloadable science fiction novels, mostly the first in an ongoing series to get you hungry for more.
3. http://www.bookrags.com/browse/ebooks - Selection of free choices, and thousands more for premium members. Can be downloaded as PDF or Word documents.
4. http://www.gutenberg.org - The first project for converting public domain works into a digital format; their selection now numbers over 5,000.
5. http://manybooks.net - A large selection of books to be read on your PDA, cellphone, iPod, iPhone and more.
6. http://www.dogpatch.org/etext.html - Hasn't been updated in several years, but links still work. The books are formatted for a doc reader on Palm. Includes classic literature, the Oz books, and even some fan fiction.
7. http://www.mslit.com/default.asp?mjr=FRE - Over 1,500 texts provided by Microsoft for their MS Reader.
8. http://netlibrary.net/WorldHome.html - Only a small selection for free; however, annual membership, and access to over 500,000 works, is only $8.95 a year.
9. http://ota.ahds.ac.uk - Over 2,000 classical texts you can download as ASCII or DOC files, some do require permission of the original uploader.
10. http://www.planetpdf.com/free_pdf_ebooks.asp?CurrentPage=1 - A decent sized collection of classic novels all in PDF format.
11. http://www.pocketpcbooks.net - Over 40 classic books specifically for your Windows Mobile Device. Come on, every one needs to carry Sun Tzu's The Art Of War on their PDA.
12. http://user.pa.net/~thompson - Run by an actual high school librarian, this site is specifically for Palm PDAs and features classic literature as well as books for teens and college bound individuals.
Conclusion
Finally, public domain is a powerful way of getting qualities materials that you can use for personal use and commercial use.
What I shared above will really make you lots of money if you put into practice. All you need to do is to go to the site listed above and start downloading public domain products that you can start selling.
Culled from SuccessDigest
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