Public Domain Product Creation

First, the general disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and can’t offer legal advice.

Second, if you plan on creating Public Domain products, you must have this on your bookshelf: “The Public Domain: How to Find & Use Copyright-free Writings, Music, Art & More.“

An interesting source of public domain info is the FBI’s Electronic Reading Room via the Freedom of Information Act.

There, you’ll find dozens and dozens of declassified files ranging from famous persons to espionage to unusual phenomenon in the form of conveniently packaged PDFs.

Since these reports were declassified and paid for US tax payer dollars, they are part of the public domain and you can bundle or package them as you wish and sell as your own products.

As an example, a seller on Amazon has bundled the lot of FBI files on The Beatles and turned them into a product.

Mind you, some of these PDFs are extremely hard on the eyes as well as appearing convoluted due to cross outs, fading, signatures and stamps. But they are an original source of data on many popular people and topics.

One approach is to hire a competent transcriptionist/editor to clean them up for you. If you’ve edited or bundled them in a unique way, you can claim a copyright for yourself.

I have to preface this post by stating that I am not a lawyer and therefore can’t offer legal advice.

Additionally, you need Stephen Fishman’s excellent book on Public Domain on your bookshelf before you go diving into the Public Domain ocean.

What I’m about to outline is a method for doing an “express” public domain project.

First off, you need an evergreen topic.

Something people were as interested in 100 years ago as they are today.

The collection of advertising cookbooks I stumbled upon recently fits the bill.

Second, if you want to avoid vetting copyrights, choose a work that was published before 1923. This content is yours to use, edit or modify as you see fit. [Read more…] about How To Choose a Good Public Domain Project

Within a few weeks, I’ll be launching a site called “Public Domain Kingdom.”

It is not something which has been revealed in any course before and has been my secret weapon for the last four years. There are literally millions of pages of content in almost all areas of human endeavor.

I’ll soon be showcasing a site that I’m flooding with dozens of professionally written articles every day in a well trafficked market using this secret source.

What I love about it is I’m by no means an expert in this category but competent enough. All I do is locate the content I want to publish, do a quick search on Google to make sure I’m not publishing duplicate conent, call my proofreading and OCR outsourcer and presto…I have original (in the search engine sense) and superbly written content on my site. [Read more…] about 50 FREE Public Domain Books in Advertising and Marketing