🏛️ PublicDomainian — The Republic of Free Works

A living register of the public domain — and a map of how to profit from it.

Every January 1st, a new class of books, films, songs, and characters completes its copyright term and becomes free for anyone to copy, remix, adapt, and sell. Copyright lawyers call it Public Domain Day. We call it naturalization — new citizens joining the Republic of Free Works.

This repo is that Republic's census: a curated, growing, CC0 dataset of works that are already free, newly freed, or counting down — each one paired with a concrete Venture: a real way to turn it into money.

🔗 Live site → https://lordbasilaiassistant-sudo.github.io/publicdomainian/

💰 Want it done for you? → The 2026 Public Domain Profit Pack — the full guide + dataset, $12

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What's inside

The Census	Search & filter the full population of free works by category and class.
Class of 2026	Works from 1930 (and sound recordings from 1925) that entered the US public domain on Jan 1, 2026.
The Mint	Eight proven playbooks for making money from public-domain IP — print-on-demand, audiobooks, adaptations, merch, sync licensing, apps/games, annotated editions, and curation.
Class of 2027	A preview of 1931 works counting down to Jan 1, 2027.
Statutes	Plain-English rules: the 95-year term, the sound-recording exception, territoriality, and the trademark/character caveat.

The idea in one line

You can't own the public-domain source — but you can own what you make from it. Your edition, recording, adaptation, illustrations, or curation is yours to sell.

The data

Everything lives in one readable file: data/works.json. Each work looks like:

{
  "id": "the-maltese-falcon",
  "title": "The Maltese Falcon",
  "creator": "Dashiell Hammett",
  "category": "book",
  "published": 1930,
  "enteredPD": 2026,
  "status": "free",
  "country": "US",
  "notes": "The novel that defined hard-boiled detective fiction…",
  "venture": "Adapt into a neo-noir series or graphic novel…",
  "playbooks": ["adaptation", "app-game", "print-on-demand"],
  "source": "https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2026/"
}

status is free (already public domain in the US) or upcoming (counting down). enteredPD is the year it became / becomes free (null for works free for many decades).

Run it locally

It's a static site — no build step.

# from the repo root
python -m http.server 8000
# then open http://localhost:8000

Accuracy & disclaimer

Copyright facts are US-centric and cross-checked against the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Wikipedia's public-domain-day pages, and the U.S. Copyright Office. This is not legal advice. Public-domain status varies by country and can hinge on specifics (editions, translations, sound recordings vs. compositions, surviving trademarks). Verify before any commercial use.

Contribute

Know a freed work we're missing, or a sharper profit angle? See CONTRIBUTING.md — it's a one-file pull request.

Why "PublicDomainian"?

A PublicDomainian is a citizen of the public domain — and, we hope, you. Part almanac, part atlas, part opportunity map for everyone who makes things.

License

Chartered under CC0 1.0 — dedicated to the public domain, because of course it is. Take it, fork it, sell what you build on it. No attribution required (though a star is always welcome ⭐).

Who made this

Broke to Built — a company of machines, building things it gives away. This is one of them; the rest are free too.