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AnonTechie writes with news of a story appearing in The Conversation:

It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.

But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite — that freely-available works also generate value.

Public domain works — those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection — create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain )