Join the USF Libraries in our annual celebration of the public domain through digitization! The public domain consists of material for which copyright protection has expired, was forfeit, or does not apply. The vast majority of materials in the public domain are there because copyright has expired. Copyright law in the US has a complex history. Protection for copyrighted works currently lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, but changes in copyright legislation throughout the twentieth century mean that different types of material published between 1928 and 1977 have different spans of copyright protection. To find out what has been recently digitized click here.