The CC Canada team has been surreptitiously burning the midnight oil in our underground lab over the past couple years on an initiative unprecedented in its scope and mandate to increase access to Canada’s cultural commons {sound of trumpets trumpeting}: The Canadian Public Domain Registry. This ground-breaking project – the most comprehensive of its kind in the world – will create an online, searchable catalogue of published works that are in the Canadian public domain.

The registry will allow users to determine the copyright status of published works and make free use of all those marvelous treasures previously unknown to be part of the public domain. But first thing, first - we need to perfect our formula for making this determination. We have put our finest mind on the job (thanks Andy!) and produced a flowchart of the highest-quality. Now we need your help. Please take the time to download the Canadian Public Domain Flowchart and provide corrections / commendations. The flowchart does not cover every case and there is room for it to grow with the addition of other media. The Canadian Public Domain Flowchart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 2.5 Canada licence.

The Canadian Public Domain Registry is developed in partnership by Access Copyright (The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), Creative Commons Canada, Creative Commons Corp. and the Wikimedia Foundation.

See Canadian Public Domain Registry Press Release and Backgrounder here.