Public Domain Legal Resources

About Public Domain Resources Web Portal

The web portal is a collection of metadata links of public domain and open access resources useful to legal education and research. The purpose to create the web portal is to make aware students, faculty members, research scholars, government officials and law clerks about the existence of public legal information and open access resources protected under creative common licences. The web portal is an effort to provides access of legal information of five major common law countries viz. Australia, Canada, India, Great Britain and United States of America. Information resources of international organizations have also been indexed for better visibility of international laws and treaties. These resources are also useful for law schools/ colleges having limited financial resources restricting subscribing costly databases. The web portal has been developed with a view to provide legal information resources available in public domain and under open access (Creative Common Licences) without consideration of any Monterey aspects and can be used for educational and research purpose, hence not liable for any breach of copyright. In case of any objection by any organization/ individual, the noted link(s) would be excluded from the portal.

UNESCO Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Government Public Domain Information

A review of the history of the term “public domain” shows that it has traditionally been associated with public land and has never had a universally accepted meaning in the context of information. Indeed, there is little in official public documents or even in the scholarly literature that deals definitively with this subject. Most legal scholars would define public domain information by what it is not; that is, any information that is not proprietary, the yin to the proprietary yang. But such a definition is insufficient, for it does not adequately characterize or describe what public domain information in fact is, and provides no basis on which to evaluate its positive role and its value to knowledge societies, especially in the context of economic and social development.

The UNESCO Recommendation on Promotion and Use of Multilingualism and Universal Access to Cyberspace provides the following definition: “Public domain information refers to publicly accessible information, the use of which does not infringe any legal right, or any obligation of confidentiality. It thus refers on the one hand to the realm of all works or objects of related rights, which can be exploited by everybody without any authorization, for instance because protection is not granted under national or international law, or because of the expiration of the term of protection. It refers on the other hand to public data and official information Produced and voluntarily made available by governments or international organizations.”

Under this definition, information in the public domain covers two distinct notions: On the one hand, “public domain information” can be defined as what is left outside the scope of any form of statutory protection including intellectual property rights, the protection of national security or public order, privacy laws and obligations of confidentiality. (Text taken from UNESCO Policy Guidelines for Governmental Public Information contributed by Paul F. Uhlir) full text link

Free Access to Law Movement around the World Montreal Declaration during Law Via Internet Conference, 2002

Free Access to Law Movement is an outcome of Montreal Declaration during Law Via Internet Conference held at Montreal in 2002.

Legal information institutes of the world, meeting in Montreal, declare that:

Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximising access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law;
Public legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all on a non-profit basis and free of charge;
Organisations such as legal information institutes have the right to publish public legal information and the government bodies that create or control that information should provide access to it so that it can be published by other parties.

Public legal information means legal information produced by public bodies that have a duty to produce law and make it public. It includes primary sources of law, such as legislation, case law and treaties, as well as various secondary (interpretative) public sources, such as reports on preparatory work and law reform, and resulting from boards of inquiry. It also includes legal documents created as a result of public funding.

Publicly funded secondary (interpretative) legal materials should be accessible for free but permission to republish is not always appropriate or possible. In particular free access to legal scholarship may be provided by legal scholarship repositories, legal information institutes or other means. (Text taken from : Declaration on Free Access to Law Full Text Link)