What public domain means
Copyright does not last forever. After a term that varies by country — generally decades counted from the author's death — a work enters the public domain: anyone can copy, reproduce and publish it, even on an ad-supported site, with no licence and no payment.
That is why paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Monet or Hokusai can be freely reproduced on this site, while paintings by Picasso, Dalí or Frida Kahlo, still protected in much of the world, cannot — those pages stay text only.
The same logic applies to books (Machado de Assis and Victor Hugo are already public domain almost everywhere) and to photos: Wikimedia Commons tags every file with its exact licence, and that tag is what this site checks before publishing any image.
Public-domain paintings already verified here
- Mona Lisa
- The Starry Night
- Water Lilies
- A Sunday on La Grande Jatte
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa
- The Night Watch
- Las Meninas
- Girl with a Pearl Earring
- The Birth of Venus
- Primavera
- The Kiss
- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
- The Scream
- The Garden of Earthly Delights
- The Third of May 1808
- Liberty Leading the People
- The Raft of the Medusa
- The Creation of Adam
O que fazer com isso
What about books?
De onde vem o dado
What about images in general?