I was in a casual meeting a couple of days ago in New York with a few large public institutions, and we were discussing how to persuade our community to put more content out on the network for public use and re/mix. We spent a lot of time discussing how to move to a more aggressive stance in asserting fair use, but we also recognized that simply placing rights-cleared content, and particularly public domain content, out on the network in a visible and consistent way would be deeply compelling for both users and institutions.

For documentary filmmakers, artists, creative users, and the general public, to know where on a website to go for public domain or free-to-use content would be a significant benefit. What came out in our discussions was a simple low- or zero-cost convention - /public.

If every institution with public domain content put a link to that content, or a search interface to that content, at /public, people would know where to go immediately to get good free stuff: images, videos, texts. This doesn't work now, but let's say you could go to getty.edu/public, or si.edu/public, or columbia.edu/public, or moma.org/public -- and that's where the free stuff was -- that would be a fantastic promotion.

This doesn't require much new work -- /public could be a simple listing of pointers to other sections of a website that contained public domain content, or the page could be a searchable index of public domain content. The next step up in functionality would be to ensure there was a harvestable sitemap at /public that contained a link list pointing to public content, and the step beyond that - beyond imagining at this point - would be the creation of an elemental api against /public content.

But let's start with simple first steps. A convention in location.

Go public -> cd ./public.