First, Some Public Domain 101

Before the printing press in the 1400′s, documents were largely copied by way of manual effort – painstakingly laborious and error-prone hand copying. Along comes the printing press and exact duplicates of works could be relatively easily created and widely distributed.  In the 15th and 16th centuries, the church and government encouraged copying documents as a means of spreading biblical word and government information but also looked down on propaganda that wasn’t their own (critical work, works of dissent).  As a result, laws were established to enforce control over what printers could print and for how long they could do so.

In the 16th century, printers from across England formed the Stationers’ Company and were collectively given the power to keep tabs on printed books and ultimately gave them dominant control over English publishing rights through the 17th century.

In the early 18th century, the uniting of England and Scotland governments produced the Copyright Act of 1709, otherwise known as the Statute of Anne, otherwise known as “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.”  Obviously copyright came before the art of making short forms of otherwise long and boring terminology.
Although vaguely similar to modern day copyright, the Statute of Anne was only 6 clauses and unlike current copyright, did not actually initially specify the term length for the protection of copyrighted property.  This did eventually change though with the establishment of a limited 14 year term (and more importantly, a shortening of the title).  the copyright term could be renewed for another 14 years if the author was still alive to do so.

As soon as copyright terms began to expire, however, booksellers attempted to defend their rights to their works via heavy government lobbying and this lobbying has more or less continued to this day.

In the US, the copyright act of 1790 worked nearly identical to the Statute of Anne, giving a term length of 14 years, plus 14 year renewal.  However works could only fall under copyright protection as long as they offered a clear copyright notice.  Otherwise they fell into what was called the Public Domain.

In 1831, the term was extended to 28 years with a 14 year renewal.
In 1909, the term was again extended to 28 years plus a renewal term of another 28 years.
In 1976, term length exploded to 75 years or life of author plus 50 years.
In 1998, this again exploded further to 95 years after publication or life plus 70 years.

Works not under copyright or having an expired copyright are considered in the public domain.  Works considered in the public domain are, in general, works, ideas and information which are intangible to private ownership and which are available for use by the members of the public in whichever way the members of the public may wish to use them for.

Thus public domain works can be redistributed, sold, repackaged and modified by anyone for whatever reason.

There are some exceptions to the rule, but any works created before 1923 are considered in the public domain.  It is important to note, however, that audio works cannot reliably be considered to be in the public domain even if created before 1923.

Works copyrighted before 1978 required their term to be renewed in their 28 copyright year.  Thus, works copyrighted before 1964 but not renewed are also in the public domain.  Turns out that most works published before 1978 were not actually renewed.

So the whole thing boils down to this: We are all allowed to reproduce and sell non-audio works created pre-1923.  We may also be allowed to repackage/modify/distribute/sell works copyrighted before 1964 should their renewal not have occurred.  And while people can get these public domain works for free from a massive variety of sources, with some creative thinking and smart packaging, some fast cash can be made by simply republishing public domain work.

Where to Find Public Domain Content?

The best places online to find public domain content is Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg is a massive website full of 100% public domain content.  It’s laid out in a wiki style and is easily searchable.  You can also download their entire catalog as an xml feed.

Project Gutenberg doesn’t have every public domain book available, however.  For example, one public domain ebook that I’ve republished is a book called Letter on Corpulence by William Banting – possibly one of the first accounts of a low carb diet.  This book cannot be found in Project Gutenberg.  Think And Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill is another book that can’t be found in this archive.

If there’s a particular book that you know of that you can’t find in Project Gutenberg, Google is the next best thing.  A search such as the following will return public domain results for the book you’re looking for:

“public domain” +”Think and Grow Rich”

Likewise, if you’re looking for public domain content related to particular keywords or terms, you can substitute the title in the above search query with those keywords.

“public domain” +”physical culture”

Republishing the content can be done in a number of ways.  The simplest is to use a text to pdf converter and link to the pdf file.

Alternatively, you can split the text into multiple html files and place adsense advertisements on each of the html pages.  This method is extremely good at generating ad impressions.  If done well and with good niche public domain content, there is potential to earn a few bucks with this technique.

I have a toolkit in the works to simplify public domain content publishing, in a simple and methodical approach that generates pdf and split html files and uses templates for each html page. I hope to have this tool available for download sooner than later.

It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that with as many people in the World as there are, a unique idea is very rare.  The likelihood that an idea I get is something that has not yet been done is very low.  This is the case with my latest small project – Spooky Sound Pad for the iPhone.

I had the idea months ago and only recently spent a few hours over one weekend putting it together.  Ok – so it wasn’t really just a few hours.  To be honest, the app took most of the weekend, but the bulk of the effort was spent on creating the icons and editing the sound files.  The dev portion was very simple.

Nearly done, the thought dawned on me that perhaps I’d search the App Store to see if anything similar already existed.  Of course, once again, I was thwarted by the saturated iPhone app market.  Several apps that do virtually the same thing already existed.  One of which is titled something almost identical. Of course, some of them cost money and Spooky Sound Pad was to be free.  Besides – there’s always room for competition, right?

In a nutshell, Spooky Sound Pad is a Halloween sound generator for the iPhone.  It’s dead simple.  It brings up a splash screen, loads the sound files, then brings up another window that has buttons on it.  When you click the buttons the associated sound plays.  That’s it.  Seriously – that’s it.

Even though I’m sure that coding this app in Objective-C would have been dead easy, I opted to use Appcelerator Titanium instead.  Recently Apple loosened the rules on how apps can be built for the iPhone.  This update to their terms of use put me at ease with using Titanium, fairly certain that my app would probably not get turned down by the App Store police simply for using a third party framework (something that may not have been the case a few months ago).

Appcelerator Titanium isn’t necessarily rock solid (I did encounter some problems that cause several reinstalls) but what it boils down to is if you can code in Javascript, you can create an iPhone app (or Android and soon Blackberry).  In total, I’d guess that I wrote about 200 lines of Javascript all said and done.  Maybe even less.

Getting the app built and ready for distribution ultimately did require me to use Xcode.  And more than once, things went bananas and I had to reinstall Titanium in order for things to properly load on the iPhone emulator.  But overall, I think that Appcelerator Titanium is the best and easiest way to get an app idea off the ground.  That said, if the app were to use OpenGL or some other API’s not supported by Titanium, I think good ol’ Objective-C and Xcode are where I’d want to head.

Another nice thing about the Titanium API is that it supports Apple’s iAd.  With one line (maybe two), I was up and running with the iAd network.  Very slick, but unfortunately all wasn’t gold with the iAds. I’m not one to actually read the manual much before jumping into something. I didn’t activate the iAd network before sending my binary to Apple and also made some assumptions with how iAd was supposed to display.  This caused me to have to rack my brain for a while with it – surfing all over forums for some answers and coming up mostly empty handed.  I’ll probably write another post on that subject.

Now that an updated binary is out, it’s really just a matter of people downloading the Free Spooky Sound Pad for the iPhone and me seeing a little advertising revenue to come in.

One small obsession that I’ve had over the last few years has been with the sound effects choice for the big night. I’ve spent previous years scouring the web for choice mixes – most containing the usual fare – dragging chains, witch cackles, horrific screams, other ghostly sounds… This year, however, I thought to approach things a little differently.

October 26th, just 5 days before Halloween, I decided I’d try and capitalize on the big night. Having been interested in electronic music creation quite some time and being familiar with some audio programs such as Audacity, Jeskola Buzz, Impulse Tracker and FastTracker and having acquired a fare share of sound samples over the years, I thought I’d try to put together my own Halloween sound effects mix and sell it online. I knew I had only a few days to pull it off, but decided that it would be a fun project. So I set the goal. Put together a half hour mix of Halloween sound effects, put up a website and figure out how to sell it online. Get it done by Halloween. Simple enough.

The next three days I spent most of my evenings creating or finding sound samples (many were public domain or under a free use kind of license – I didn’t spend a cent on samples). I had a fairly good mic and water dripping sounds or howling winds are incredibly simple to make. I also have an old Korg M1 and other musical devices that I’ve acquired through the years. Once I had a nice collection of sounds, I started arranging them with Audacity.

Audacity is an open source multi-track audio program. It has a number of built-in effects (reverb, chorus, flange, etc) and supports VST effects. Audacity also can output to a number of audio formats including mp3 and ogg. I also used Jeskola Buzz to create some loops. Buzz is a free modular “sound studio”. You can string synth machines, sound generators, or simple trackers and run them through a multitude of various effect modules (again like reverb or chorus), but allows for real-time effect mixing similar to Ableton (although no where near as complete). Fortunately when mixing Halloween sounds, very little musical effort is required. Recording a few seconds of a Spanish quote from my Spanish 101 university textbook, modifying the pitch, reversing the sample and then adding some chorus and reverb can produce a pretty trippy, messed up sample, perfect for a Halloween mix.

It was really fun to mix all the samples and within a couple of days I had a 27 minute track that was pretty spooky. In fact, Sonya told me that it was possibly too scary for really little kids and warned me that I should probably wait until the tiny ones were done trick or treating and the older kids were coming out, if we were going to use the mix during Halloween. Personally, I thought it was pretty much right on.

Unfortunately by the time I was 90% good with the mix, it was only two days before Halloween. Two days isn’t a very long time to get something out there, market it and get people to buy in.

On the evening of the 29th, I rendered the final mp3 file. It was then time to figure out how to sell it.

My first thought was to throw the mix up on Reverbnation. I created an account, but free accounts only allow 8MB audio file uploads. I then found Tradebit – a website that allows you to sell files online, be them audio files, pdf documents, photos, etc. Tradebit gives you a free account, unlimited file sizes and bandwidth. You upload the file, enter a description and other information about the file, upload an image to represent the file and then set a price. I chose $4.99.

Tradebit uses Paypal as the payment system, which is perfect. A customer clicks on the item, clicks purchase and gets redirected directly to Paypal where the transaction can be processed. After payment, the customer is redirected to the file download, which is available for some time after the payment has been completed. Tradebit also has a search feature allowing potential customers to search and fine items for sale on their site. The file was roughly 30MB so it had to be uploaded via FTP. I used trusty Filezilla to do that. The process was incredibly straight forward.

Ok- the file was up and officially for sale. At this point it was around 9pm on the Thursday. I had spent about 2.5 hours looking for an online shop to sell the mp3.

Next, I wanted a “CD cover” image. Although no physical CD’s were going to be distributed, I figured having a CD cover was necessary as most music, digital download or not, has one. It was getting late though and I needed to do something quickly. I remembered a neat trick I learned in a Photoshop course I took years ago that produced instantly creepy images. I powered up my scanner and proceeded to scan my face and hand (eyes tightly shut of course – those things can seriously blind you otherwise). I opened the resulting image in The Gimp, modified the contrast and played with the burn tool. I then used a creepy looking font and gave it a title and voila – the 10 minute CD cover was born.

I then logged on to my Dreamhost account and saw that I had a free .com domain registration available and after various combinations of words, found that www.wickedcreep.com was available. I registered it and hosted it on Dreamhost in a matter of minutes. I then uploaded the CD cover pic and wrote up a super quick description and sales pitch in an html file. I included a link provided by Tradebit in a couple of spots on the web page. At this point, it was nearly midnight, but for the most part it was up and available. All that was needed was some marketing. Otherwise nobody was ever going to find the page, let alone purchase the mp3 before Halloween and I knew that after the 31st I could expect 0 sales.

I decided at this point that I needed to make it highly visible. I figured I’d offer the track for free streaming on Youtube or something. I opened up Windows Movie Maker, dragged in the CD cover image and the audio file and 10 minutes later was uploading a .wmv video file to Vimeo (which allows larger files to be uploaded than Youtube). As part of the description I linked back to wickedcreep.com. Within minutes, view counts were increasing on the Vimeo page. I also decided to embed a video player on the wickedcreep.com website.

I then created a wickedcreep Twitter account and followed a few people. I also joined some Halloween ning.com social networks under the wickedcreep user id and made some postings, attempting to promote the track (the following day I’d find out that most of the moderators of these social networking sites were to delete my account as they didn’t take too kindly to people promoting things for sale).

But after trying to spread the word for a few hours, I eventually called it a night at 2am. I had more or less succeeded in creating a product and making it available online. Of course, it was just two days before the product would not see any interest, but it was fun regardless.

As the next 48 hours went by, I received about 6 sales. I had reduced the price to $1.99 per download so after Tradebit took their 25%, I was left with about $9 in sales. That’s all I saw from it. I had spent countless hours that week to make only $9. But having spent nothing besides my free time on the project, it was still profit. And despite the dismal profit that it was, I was super stoked.

I figure that while the Wicked Creep 2009 Halloween mix didn’t do incredibly well, with a bit more time and promotion, the 2010 remix is going to absolutely kill it.

Check out the wicked creep website here: www.wickedcreep.com.