Professional Documents
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Brought to you by
Debra Conrad
http://www.PublicDomainTreasureHunter.com
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A Quick Note About Spelling And Grammar Errors…
As you are reading along you will most likely notice that this publication (as
with most of our publications), is chock full of “typos” and grammar errors.
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Publishers
Hi... It's Debra Conrad (in case you didn't know that already) :)
I'm so happy that you have taken the first step in your "education"
about using Public Domain content.
Get a pen and notebook... you are about to get the ride of your
online business career!
Buried in secret nooks and crannies all over the World Wide Web,
are millions of pages of content that is free for you to use.
Those lucky treasure hunters that are privy to this secret know that a vast, untold wealth of
content treasure is freely available and ready to be plundered with just a few clicks of the
mighty mouse.
This treasure trove of content is patiently waiting for you - ready to be used in any way you
can imagine - without having to pay the original authors any compensation or give one line of
credit (unless you choose to).
To find these hidden treasures, you need a special kind of map – a map created by true public
domain treasure hunters, left behind for other hunters to follow along in their footsteps.
You will no longer have to fruitlessly browse the internet searching for the "free" content you
need for your new product or website. I've sailed ahead and discovered all of the best online
treasure troves for you, leaving a map behind so that you can follow my path!
Be wary! This map is not intended for use by anyone that doesn't yet know the basics of
finding and using Public Domain content. You still need to have the basics under your
belt.
This guide walks new public domain treasure hunters step-by-step through
understanding exactly what the public domain is and how you can use it to create tons of great
products so easily it will make you wonder why anyone would ever spend weeks agonizing over
creating their own original content!
I finally decided that I could write about half the book using Public
Domain material. The other half is actual stories written by the
Homesteaders themselves.
This is about the time I fell in love with all things Public Domain… but
didn’t find my real calling to use it until Jan - 2008. I found that I could
use Public Domain material to fill my blogs with unusual and relevant
content as well as create products that would be profitable.
Public Domain material has saved my butt more times than I can count.
I am now creating products and blog content using public domain material to prove the point
that you don’t have to be a “guru” to make a living with blogs and your own products.
I also shares no-nonsense online business advice and personal productivity tips and strategies
on my blog at http://www.DebraConrad.com.
It's easy to come up with so many ideas for products, but the challenge sometimes is
transforming these ideas into reality.
Anyway... I stumbled across the idea of using other people’s time, effort and talent for my own
personal gain. It's pretty simple really. When I learned that millions of books were no longer
copyright protected... it was like a great big door to the library had been opened just for me to
walk right in and take any book I wanted.
I can now take any number of books, mash up the content to create an "in demand product"
and have unique products ready to sell in less time than it will take most writers to create an
outline.
It's like having an army of ghost writers at your disposal cranking out millions and millions
of pages of killer valuable content night and day and you don't have to pay them a dime ever!
And I'm not just talking about books and articles either. We're talking music, motion pictures,
animations, audio recordings, artwork, photographs - all sorts of things!
Insiders have been using these incredibly valuable works to create all sorts of products and
have been making hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions in some cases, with them
year after year.
e-books,
printed books and manuals,
audio programs,
videos,
clothing like T-shirts and hats,
other physical products like coffee mugs,
mouse pads,
framed artwork prints -
literally anything you can imagine!
Within the pages of this book, you’ll discover the answers to many of the most common
questions regarding the Public Domain and how to use copyright-free material to create
your own profit-generating products faster than you ever dreamed possible!
According to Webster’s Dictionary, Public Domain refers to “the realm embracing property
rights that belong to the community at large, are unprotected by copyright or patent, and are
subject to appropriation by anyone”
“The Public Domain is a 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 term public domain is just a term used to describe the millions of works that have
been produced over the last century that no longer have copyright protection.
The public domain inherently encompasses all creative works and other mediums of
information that are not protected by copyright law.
When a work is no longer protected because the copyright has expired, anyone can take that
work and do whatever they want with it legally.
For instance, when a book is first published in the U.S. it is protected by copyright laws so
that no one else can take that same work and publish it as their own product. The owner of
the copyright for the work is automatically granted certain exclusive private rights to the
work and the owner alone has control over how the work is presented and distributed.
Anyone caught in violation of copyright laws is said to have committed copyright
infringement and will most likely end up in court very quickly.
Copyrighted works are protected for a certain number of years and then eventually the
copyrights expire and the work falls into the public domain. Then the work is no longer
protected by copyright and anyone can do anything they want with the work without
having to worry about getting sued or landing themselves into legal trouble.
Copyright Laws can be very complicated as they have had a very dynamic history in
both the U.S. and abroad. The copyright laws that are applied to a work can change
radically depending on what year the work was first published and what country the work
was published in.
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 become 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) forbid certain types of work
from being copyrighted. This includes the examples mentioned above, as well as
government publications.
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 into 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!
The most important thing about public domain works is that anyone can use them to
create products of their own, either through re-packaging, or from a derivative work.
Note: A derivative work is, according to copyright law, an artistic creation that
includes aspects of work previously created and protected. Derivative works of
copyright-protected works are prohibited by law, unless a specific permission is
acquired by the author / copyright holder. Since commercial use of a work in the
public domain is not protected by copyright law, creating a derivative work out
of the public domain is commercially legal.
Since you are free to use information / works from the public domain and use them either
personally or commercially without restrictions, the possibility of profiting from public
domain works is immediate and very real.
Many public domain works include (nearly) timeless and entirely relevant
information on wildly popular ‘interests’ such as making money, self-
improvement, writing, playing sports, interpreting dreams, astrology, public
speaking, entrepreneurship, recipes and lots more.
The information is immediately usable – for many public domain works all
you need to do is to simply do some minor editing, re-package the knowledge into a
medium of your liking (we discuss this in more detail a little later) and then sell it.
Of course, you can also produce derivative works, but the power of immediate re-
usability is one of the primary reasons many people are attracted to the public
domain.
Use of a particular public domain work by someone else does not mean that you
cannot use that same public domain work for your own commercial purpose.
In other words, you can use the SAME public domain resources that someone else
has used, and restructure them to suit your commercial venture.
Public Domain works are in diverse mediums. You have software, books,
instruction manuals, photographs, music and even government publications. Any
and all of these mediums can be used to generate specific and different types of
selling opportunities.
Public Domain works are not restricted in the format they are stored.
Thus you can convert a book on interpreting dreams into an audio course, or create
a website around a book on public speaking. This is more of a ‘how to profit from
public domain works’ feature, but it’s important enough to note here.
It seems that many people believe that everything on the Internet is in the Public Domain
and that they can use everything and anything that they find on the Internet for any
purpose they want.
Wrong!
It’s amazing how many people believe this. A friend of mine used to believe this himself
until he got himself in big trouble really early in his career (that’s a story for another day!).
– For now consider the following warning: Don't use anything off the internet
unless you have done the research to clear it first!
Even content that is posted on the internet in the form of text and images is in most cases
protected by copyright laws and there are very, very stiff penalties for the illegal use of such
things.
Sure, you know as well as we do that you can download illegally copied music and movies
all day long from the internet but believe me, you don’t want to get caught trying to sell this
stuff and you certainly don’t want to attempt to build a business off of illegally copied
works!
You can’t just copy other people’s stuff off of the internet and expect not to get into
legal hot water. Go ahead and try it – You’ll start getting these really fun letters with
words like “Cease and Desist” in them. It’s no fun at all.
You name it – it’s out there just waiting to be found! Some things are harder to find... or
take a bit of thinking-outside-the-box to locate, but there’s an almost unlimited supply of
material to pull from!
Just imagine - over a centuries worth of intellectual properties at your disposal! Do you
have any idea of how many books have been published in the United States alone in just the
last 100 years? We are talking millions of books on just about any subject you can think of.
And the exciting part is this - of the hundreds of thousands of works published
between 1923 and 1963, only roughly 15% had their copyrights renewed.
This means that around 85% of all works published between 1923 And 1963 are up
for grabs!
That's millions of pages of material that you can use to create your own
outrageously profitable multi-media information publishing empire...faster than
you ever dreamed possible....
You’ll find tons of images and artwork, films, music, books, and other written, visual, and
auditory items of all kinds!
For now just realize this – The public domain is the best thing to ever
happen to information publishing and your online business!
The public domain is a huge untapped goldmine of content that you can utilize anyway
you want. Millions of works are your for the taking – you just have to know how.
In my business, I focus mostly on finding how-to books that have fallen into the public
domain because those are what lend themselves easily to being republished as information
products.
And not only that, but you don’t even have to know much of anything about the subject.
When you write a book yourself you have to be an expert on the subject you are writing
about.
How can you write about something you know nothing about?
When you use public domain material you don’t have to be the expert – all of the hard work
has already been done for you – you are using the work that an expert has already done for
you to create a new product.
Never before has there been a quicker or easier way of creating your own
information products. It’s like having an army or writers at your disposal. You can
instantly grab all of the material you need on virtually any subject you can imagine
just by plundering the hidden vaults of the public domain.
No more spending months slaving over your keyboard, no more having to pay ghost-writers
ridiculously high fees to write for you. Are you starting to understand the true power of the
public domain?
I'm not just talking about a bunch of dusty, useless old books here.
I am talking about the keys to cranking out your own hot-selling info products very quickly
by using work that has already been done for you by experts on their subjects that you can
legally steal.
And the thing is – hardly anybody knows about this! Or, if they do know about it they don’t
really know how to go about using it properly.
Many people have the misconception that anything old, (i.e. old enough to have had its
copyright protection expire) isn’t worth anything today. They think there’s no way anyone
would be interested in something that was written 50 years ago.
Ever since the beginning of time, mankind has been dealing with
essentially the same issues no matter how far we think we have advanced.
It makes no difference whether you were born in 1874 or 1974 you still essentially have the
same problems to solve and challenges to overcome. For instance, you may want to:
You get the idea. We’re not that different really than we were 100 years ago. There are
still today millions of people on the internet searching for ideas that will help them improve
their marriages, or help them advance in their careers, or help them achieve a better quality
of life physically, spiritually, and emotionally.
Sure, fads come and go. Nobody cares about hula hoops anymore, (well... they might
care, but it probably wouldn't be a best seller) but there are lots of timeless “evergreen”
subjects that people pursued way back that are still pursued today.
There weren’t such things as computers or digital cameras back in 1935 so you
won’t find any books written about them from back then but there are plenty of ideas that
you will find that can be very easily carried over into the digital age.
What are chat rooms and blogs if nothing more than just more modern mediums for human
communication?
Plus - the US Government produces work every day about all sorts of current
issues... Really. It's almost all free to use!
Much of what lies on the realm of public domain is still relevant today.
How to take 3 strokes off of your golf game by improving your swing
How to get your dog to stop barking all night long
How to grow 10 pound tomatoes in your own backyard
All you need to do is to find the relevant public domain work, re-package it
according to your needs and then create a business model around it.
Use Public Domain as a source of content for your website. Whether you
want to start a membership website or just an informational website that earns
money through advertising and affiliate revenue, the important thing is that you
won’t have to wait for months to create the content – it’s ready for you to use
immediately.
Change the format of the public domain work – create an audio course for a
how-to-manual to increase the ‘perceived value’ of the product so you can make
more money off of the same information.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens and dozens of concrete examples of
using public domain works within your business, either to supplement your business model
or to create a new income stream.
Example:
Let’s say you find a book titled ‘The Art of Playing Poker’ from 1960 that you’ve
checked and now know is free of copyright and is firmly in the public domain. What
should you do with it?
Your first step would be of course to have it scanned (via an OCR service) and
converted into an editable format such as MS Word or even simple text files.
Next, you would decide on what you actually want to do with the product. Let’s say
this is your first business venture and you’re interested in getting started
FAST and want to see some results before you dedicate more time and money to this
idea.
Break up the book into separate articles, build a website around the
content and earn AdSense revenue from them.
I have more ingenious marketing and business ideas that you can use to make money from
the public domain, no matter what your commitment level. Keep reading...
Now... I'm not telling you that you can just get any public domain information off the
internet and create a word document and it will sell. It does take some effort to publish
good products. And... you need to know a bit about the format requirements of an ebook or
"special report".
But, once you know the basics of ebook design... it will be easy to for you to create a product
1-2-3!
Chop up public domain books and use as content for articles that you can post up
all over the internet and drive traffic back to your website.
You can also use public domain as content for improving the
ranking and positioning of your website
... or use as content for viral pdf's that people will pass around to their friends which
provides a link back to your website producing, you guessed it - more traffic!
It's important to have ton's of articles and website content at the ready. These days you
need content to post in many different places on the internet to drive traffic back to your
website.
One of the biggest mistakes a new internet marketer makes - thinking that "if I build it...
they will come". First the search engines have to find your site and then they will "help"
you get traffic if you know how to go after all of the "generators" on the internet.
This takes loads and loads of content. One of the best and "cheapest" ways to have a
back load of great content? Get your hands on a few Public Domain books or magazines
dealing with some aspect of your website’s niche topic.
What could you do then??? Well, how about taking a chapter from that book and
making a free special report? Start taking names and email addresses in exchange for this
free report?
Now... you’re making a few $$ and you have a list to market other products to.
My next move would be to find another public domain book on quilts (hopefully filled with
pictures) and make a few ebooks to sell. Now you have a few products of your own to sell to
your list.
Did you realize that in just a few short paragraphs I have just described a business plan?
What are you waiting for?
Printed Books and Manuals - How about using one of the many Print-On-
Demand services available to create your own physical printed and bound
books that you can ship directly to your customers?
You could create all sorts or books or manuals very easily.
You could even create your own high-end "home study" courses just by putting your
product in a three-ring binder and using dividers to separate the sections.
Would you love to be an author? If you really paid attention to the information about
my first book (see About the Author)... you will notice that Ididn't write one bit of that
book’s content herself.
Audio products are extremely popular and are a great chance to separate yourself from the
competition. Everyone in your niche selling ebooks? Be different, sell audio books
instead!
create special bonus material that you use to entice people to buy your other
products,
use as an "upsell" with one of your existing products,
use as a free gift to solicit testimonials from happy customers,
create resell rights products and sell to other people looking for their own products
to sell,
create products that you can give away to people who buy products you recommend
through your affiliate links.
You have to work a little bit harder to find just the right public domain product to
fit into this idea... but they are out there. And... when you find it, it will make a
killer product!
What Are Some Other Creative Ways That People Are Using
To Profit From The Public Domain?
I've had seen people (they shared these really interesting ideas with me) profit from Public
Domain material. Honestly, I was given quite a few ideas that we had never even considered
before!
Be creative! The only limit to what you can create with Public Domain material is your
imagination!
Check out some of the clever ways people are using Public Domain material to make money:
Or... you could print this picture in black and white or sepia and hand color them. Hand
colored prints are of especially high value if well done.
Video– Find Public Domain films and convert them into video for your website or to sell. You
can post Public Domain video on YouTube.com to drive traffic to your website. Or... you can
just put the film on a DVD and sell it on eBay!
Want an example?
I found this movie on the archive.org website:
This seller digitized the movie and put it onto a DVD for sale on eBay:
I used this same film from Internet Archive to drive traffic to one of my niche websites. I
chopped and mashed it up so that it was relevant for use by today's DIY decorator:
Compilation CD/DVD – Find collections of something like vintage crochet patterns or doll
house plans that are in the Public Domain and combine them together on one CD/DVD.
Huge collections of maps, baseball cards, recipes, Christian images... all these and more are all
being sold on eBay and on huge bookstore style websites.
Here is an example of a collection of more than 250 fine Japanese woodblock prints
from before 1915 on CD available on eBay:
Pick a topic/subject that interests you and start looking for everything you can find related to
that topic. Put all that great Public Domain information onto some digital format CD/DVD and
create sets to sell. You won't believe how easy this is to do!
Collected Works – Find a bunch of Public Domain books on one specialized subject and
package them together to create a super collection or even bundle books by the same author.
One gal told me about how she did really well with a compilation of old ghost stories that she
strategically released just before Halloween.
Another highly profitable area is genealogy. Here is a CD compilation of books for genealogists:
Other website owners love to link to websites that offer lots of easy to use, relevant content
related to a specialty. You may not be able to find just one book that covers everything a niche
specific Wiki might need. But several public domain books might do the trick.
What if you could find several large books filled with terms and definitions
about Railroads or Steam Engines? This would be a gold mine for railroad,
model railroad, industrial steam engine or model steam engine enthusiasts.
Then - take all that information and mash it up into a "guide" for your niche
and sell it.
(You wouldn’t want to try this with a regular Encyclopedia as the information provided in these
is too generalized.)
Rare Japanese Artwork – One of my subscribers revealed that he takes really old and rare
Japanese paintings and reproduces them as framed prints which he then sells to collectors and
galleries across the country. Maybe something like this eBay seller:
Humorous “Old-Timey” Photographs – Another gal about how she has built a whole
business around taking old public domain black and white photographs and adding humorous
captions or little funny cartoon bubbles to them and selling them on ebay as mouse pads,
magnets, calendars, and t-shirts.
This is a great idea if you have a good sense of humor and are very creative. We’ve seen some
other publishing companies do the exact same thing by producing humorous greeting cards
using old public domain photographs.
PLR - I've been using "rewritten" public domain content to help fill up my new PLR site.
You can read about how I'm using Public Domain content for some of my articles:
http://www.publicdomaintreasurehunter.com/2010/10/28/follow-along-as-mandy-learns-to-
use-public-domain-content/
Yes! There are. There are thousands of really good online sources for Public Domain content
– it’s like a giant warehouse for hidden public domain gold - the challenge is that they can be
extremely difficult to find sometimes.
Just try going to Google and searching for “Public Domain” content and you’ll see what I
mean. This method of trying to find public domain content will drive you nuts and make you
throw yours hands up in disgust and you’ll probably give up very quickly.
You’ll find that’s it not very hard to find sites that have collections of public domain works that
you can download and start using right away. You just have to know where to look and how to
find them.
There is public domain stuff all over the place online but here’s the catch –
nobody is going to advertise the fact that their using public domain material for fear that
everyone else is going to rip off their content.
Think about it - if you built a website using public domain material or created an e-book using
public domain content would you tell everyone that? No way! Most likely, you’d slap a
copyright notice on it and stay quite about the fact that the content is actually from the public
domain.
So, what most people don’t realize is that there are thousands of websites that are built from
public domain content but how do you know which ones? You don’t.
Here is the biggest challenge most people face when it comes to the public domain
– They have no idea how to tap into this vast treasure of public domain works.
The big question becomes – How do I find Public Domain works, especially the really good
stuff that I can use to create products that people will actually want to buy?
That’s a great question and it’s at the heart of what this report is really all about – how
to find good, high-quality public domain works that you can use right now to create products
that are relevant to our times, based on popular subject matter, that people will actually whip
out their credit cards to buy?
Here’s another revelation for you that I have learned from hard-won
experience and hundreds of hours of research……
I'm telling you – the really good stuff, the stuff that is the most commercially viable
(profitable) hasn’t made it online yet.
When hunting for good public domain content, I spend most of our time and energy out in the
real world – used book stores, libraries, etc. and online used book portals such as Alibris and
AbeBooks.
Now, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression here – you can find some really good stuff
online, tons of good stuff.
The point I am trying to express to you is that if you only limit your searches for public domain
content to the online world you are making a huge mistake and really limiting the
results of your searches.
Just keep that in mind.
6. Many works are automatically in the Public Domain as soon as they are created.
My favorite area is number 2 above as I believe that this forty year period contains the
best, most commercially viable (i.e. salable) works.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s a ton of great stuff that was published before 1923 that you can
repackage and sell as well.
I was surprised to find that some people think that when a book is “Out of Print” that means
that the book’s copyright has expired and it is no longer protected.
Being out of print has nothing to do with the status of the book’s copyright protection. Lots and
lots of books are currently out of print but that doesn’t mean that the copyright has expired,
just that for whatever reason the publisher isn’t printing anymore copies at that particular
period in time.
Not necessarily.
There was a time that every work had to include a valid copyright notice to be legally protected
by U.S. Copyright Law and we will be talking about this a little later.
What you need to know here is that as of March 1, 1989 it became optional in the U.S. to
include a copyright notice on any work. Even without the notice, any work created after March
1, 1989 could be protected by copyright.
This is true for anything – articles, advertisements, works of art, images, books, movies.
So, don’t make the mistake of assuming that something is copyright free just because there is
no copyright notice on it.
Most publishers still include the copyright notice just to make it absolutely clear that the work
is protected, but many don’t.
The best policy is to just always assume that if you are looking at a
creative work, it is copyright protected unless proven otherwise. Don’t try
to use it without permission.
A work published in the U.S. before 1989 without a valid copyright notice could very well be in
the Public Domain.
Absolutely! You can do anything you want with the material ~ that’s the whole point! You can
claim authorship, you can change the title, and you can edit all of the material in any way you
see fit.
A public domain work is like putty in your hands and can be “sculpted” into anything your
creativity and ingenuity can come up with!
If you feel uncomfortable claiming authorship, you could always keep the original authors
name intact and establish yourself as the “publisher” or “editor”.
It’s really all up to what your marketing angle is for the product. In some cases, I will
slap my name on the product as the author (actually, I almost always use a pen name), but
more often than not, I will use the original author’s name to establish credibility especially if
the author is well known in the particular niche that I'm working in.
For instance if you have a product that teaches people how to draw cartoons, it would be much
better to have a well known cartoon artist’s name attached to it rather than just your own. This
way you can play off of the author’s credibility and name recognition in your sales copy for the
product.
Keeping the author’s name and adding your own as the editor or the publisher is a great way to
qualify yourself to be able to sell the product in your customer’s eyes. You don’t have to be
the expert, just the editor.
I almost always recommend changing the title of a work because in most cases, you can come
up with a better title than the original. You can come up with an exciting, colorful, benefit-
driven title that will grab people’s attention.
Another major benefit of changing the title is that you make the work your own unique product
only available through you.
If you use the same title and the original author you make it really easy for someone to find the
same work somewhere else online (unless the original is scarce) or even worse, you could be
announcing to your competition that the work is in the Public Domain.
You’d be giving them the exact title and author making it really easy for them to go get their
own copy of the same work and create a directly competing product.
This question was asked in variety of different ways but the essence of it is this – what can I do
to make a public domain work my own unique product, fully protected by copyright law?
In other words, “How can I keep other people’s hands out of my cookie jar?”
The first thing you have to understand is that once material is in the Public Domain, it’s there
for good. If you use Public Domain material as is (without modification), anyone
has the right to take that material and use for their own purposes.
You don’t want other marketers ripping you off, stealing your products and claiming them as
their own.
In order to protect your products, you’ll need to do a few simple things that will make your
work eligible for copyright protection. Now, you can’t just re-copyright a public domain work
as is, you have to create what is referred to as a “derivative work”.
A derivative work is when you take another work (one that you have the
legal rights to such as a public domain work) and use it to create a new
original work. You can then copyright protect this new work.
Here is what I usually do to with a public domain work to satisfy the minimal creativity
requirements and produce a derivative work that qualifies for copyright protection:
Doing any of the above things will produce a derivative work which is then copyright protected
and will help fend off most would-be thieves.
You must understand this though – when you create a derivative work, only the changes and
things that you have added are protected, not the original public domain material.
In other words, someone could still come along and extract the public domain content (if they
somehow found that it was in the Public Domain) from your work and legally use it but they
can’t use your original stuff.
Your job is to make it hard to tell what’s in the public domain and what’s not by implementing
the actions we have recommended above.
And of course, under no circumstances would you advertise that your product is based on
Public Domain material in the first place.
This brings up another really important point and I am sharing this with you to keep you out of
trouble – Always Go Back To The Original Source!
What I mean is, never copy a copy if you can avoid it. If you know that someone else’s product
is based on a Public Domain work and you would like to create a similar product, don’t try to
use theirs, go find the original work that they used to create their product and use
the original to create your own unique product.
So the moral of the story is this – don’t use someone else’s derivative work, use what you have
learned to go find the original public domain work to create your own unique copyright
protected products.
Many people seem concerned about the level of competition in their respective marketplaces.
Their belief is that if too many people start marketing the same type of products (that is, there
is too much competition in one niche), it isn’t as profitable as before to start a business in that
niche. This is true no matter what market you’re working in.
I can understand the concern however, it’s important to understand the ‘nature’ of the Public
Domain.
The Public Domain is not a business in itself. It is the information, the knowledge
contained in public domain works that can be used within a business.
In other words, the public domain is a very powerful resource. Nothing else.
What is true is that since everybody can essentially use the same information, you can have a
situation in which the same knowledge, packaged in more or less the same formats, is
saturating the market.
You have a situation where the public – the people buying your products, now have 10, or even
20 similar products to choose from. That’s not an enviable position to be in. Heck, it’s almost
like you were a real-world business.
It’s the same situation many brick and mortar (for that matter, many online businesses as well)
are in right now, and while many are failing, many are also quite successful in what they do.
Economics tells us that if supply (you and your competition) is higher than the demand (the
people’s need to buy that particular information or product), then you’re in for a bummer.
With more sellers and less buyers, prices will fall and profits will vanish.
Follow solid business advice. Don’t move into a market that’s already too saturated unless:
You have considerable experience in running a business
You have a special advantage in that market AND
You have multiple streams of income to fall back on in case this deal goes bad.
Find a niche that has little competition, or still room for entry
Select your business model
Use public domain works as your product / content source, and
Market your business like crazy.
Thanks to the abundance of online scams such as the ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes prevalent on the
Internet, people seem to have forgotten that while there may be a thousand and one ways to
make money, there are always a few core principles that invariably apply whenever you’re
talking about building a business or an alternate income stream.
But enough about that. Let’s concentrate on the ‘competition’ factor in the public domain.
From what you’ve learned so far, you should know that the ‘competition’ itself is not a product
of the public domain.
The best way to protect yourself is by being organized. I keep permanent file folders for each of
my Public Domain projects that contain all of the support documentation for that project just
in case somebody decides to “blow the whistle” on me.
It's the same as PLR and Resell Rights Products you purchase. You should always keep
the documentation that proves you have the rights to use the content.
In this folder I keep a copy of the original work if possible or at least a photocopy of the
copyright page that shows the title, author, publisher, and copyright date.
I also keep all of my notes explaining how I found the work, the process I went through to
verify the work is in the Public Domain, and the results of my copyright renewal search.
If you had the U.S. Copyright Office or a private search firm run the copyright check for you,
you would want to keep the results of their search in this folder too.
Basically, you just want to have a paper trail that documents all of your efforts to ensure that
the work is in the Public Domain.
If you ever get a “Cease & Desist” letter from another entity claiming that they are
the copyright owners of the work in question, respond to the letter immediately, don’t
ignore it.
Tell them you are investigating their claims. Then double check all of your work to
verify whether or not they may be right.
If you are sure that the work is in the Public Domain and you don’t want to give up the
right to use the material (especially if it’s proven valuable to you), then you can decide
where to go from there but by staying organized from the beginning, you’ll have
everything you need to back up your claims.
I personally have never been challenged, in fact, I've had nothing but
favorable experiences using Public Domain works.
This is another area where people are often ignorant, or just don’t make the effort to
think hard (no offense, it’s our job to get those creative juices flowing, just hang on for
a little while longer)
When most Internet Marketers talk about the public domain, they only talk about
books and recipes and self-improvement courses. Now, this is either because they don’t
know better, or they’re not telling you everything.
With government publications on environmental issues, public health issues, and many more
subjects of relevant interest being placed in the public domain every year, this is just ONE of
the sources of public domain that you can use to generate a stable income stream.
And of course, the public domain is not limited to books and reports. You have art, music,
software, and most importantly, ideas.
Ideas are not the property of any one person. Therefore, any idea, any great theory, any great
scientific achievement can be used without fear of legal reprisals.
The Public Domain is far wider, and far deeper an ocean than you think (and the
Internet Marketing gurus would have you believe).
Warmly,
http://www.PublicDomainTreasureHunters.com
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