Swiss Foundation Public Domain

The Swiss Foundation Public Domain is a non-profit organization specialized in the conservation and utilization of public domain music and film material.

We see our mission as rescuing recordings from past decades, produced on sensitive and easily damaged materials, from deterioration and potential oblivion. Our first goal is to have gramophone records and motion pictures, which are an invaluable resource, transformed into longterm readable and usable data files by expert staff, using state of the art procedures (such as FLAC and Theora). Our second goal is the investigation of the copyright status, the cataloging of the description of any work in our database and the upload to Wikimedia Commons.

Chronology of Key events

 * January 2009: Establishment of the Public Domain Project
 * December 2009: The Public Domain Radio starts his broadcasting
 * January 2010: The MediaWiki of the Public Domain Project goes online
 * December 2010: The Public Domain Project is among the winners of the first competition of ideas of Wikimedia Deutschland
 * September 2011: Arrival of the provided laser turntable by Wikimedia Deutschland
 * February 2012: The ITZ of the Zurich University of the Arts offers the server housing and sponsors bandwidth and rackspace
 * August 2012: Martin Osterwalder donates 35,000 gramophone records (phonograph records)
 * September 2012: First speech at a Wikimedia conference (WikiCon 2012 in Dornbirn, Austria)
 * December 2012: Establishment of the Swiss Foundation Public Domain
 * February 2013: The supervision of the foundation is now up to the Federal Department of Home Affairs
 * May 2013: The Swiss Foundation Public Domain is now officially a charitable organization (tax exempt) in Switzerland
 * August 2013: We attend at the Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. The result is a partnership with a digitization project in Uruguay
 * January 2014: The Public Domain project is actively supported by Wikimedia CH in 2014
 * February 2014: Integration of the digitization project in the CD recording of the SOS-ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich)
 * April 2014: Dominio Público Sonoro Uruguay becomes the official representative of the Public Domain Project in South America
 * July 2014: Start of the digitization of the Martin Osterwalder collection. WMCH financed an employee with Asperger syndrome and the SOS-ETH is sponsoring a space for the recording studio
 * August 2014: We attend at the Wikimania 2014 in London. Wikimedia Deutschland gives us a literary grant for the procurement of much needed reference books (Copyright investigation)
 * September 2014: We attend at WikiCon 2014 in Cologne. Wikimedia CH assumes the cost for another employee with Asperger syndrome. The record cleaning machine is now ready for use. We find a pleasure in the Wiki of Music (WoM) and discuss about a closer cooperation