Over the winter break, I finally got my public domain popup server completed. This device lives in my campus office, offering a local Wifi hot-spot anyone can connect to and then download public domain media. It is only within the last few years that copyright law has allowed the earliest movies to enter public domain in the U.S. Both the Internet Archive and Duke University’s Center for the Study of Public Domain write frequently about this, keeping track of the new media that enters public domain each year.

So why create a popup with the media? Much of the material is posted to YouTube, which makes it easy to view but not easy to download and incorporate into creative projects. The Internet Archive makes files more accessible, but it can often be hard to determine if something hosted there is actually in the public domain. This popup offers a curated collection of public domain materials that can easily be downloaded and incorporated into creative projects.

My hope is that students and other members of the university will stumble upon this project, learn a little about public domain law, and enjoy reading, watching, and listening to public domain media. And perhaps even incorporate it into the games, films, and other media they are creating!

I’ve also been able to add a folder that contains public domain material that I’ve personally digitized from records in the collection from our local historical society.

I had started this project several years ago trying to use LibraryBox software on a small router, but both the hardware and software was no longer being supported or updated, so the result was much more finicky than I would have hoped.

This time, I used a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with a MicroPi Wifi Multimedia Server installed. It works like a dream. A 512 GB microSD card means I have plenty of storage for many more years of public domain material as it becomes available in the future.