User:Milton Beychok/Sandbox

The "public domain" is a legal term. Think of it as the timeless repository of civilization. Whatever is in the public domain belongs to no one, which really means it belongs to everyone. The greatest works of Western civilization, from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Grimm's Fairy Tales, are in the public domain.

In a particularly generous provision of U.S. copyright law, any work by an employee of the U.S. government in the course of employment is automatically in the public domain. We the people paid for it with our taxes and it belongs to us. Most of the documents, photos, maps and videos I have collected on Trinity Atomic Web Site are from U.S. Government documents and believed to be in the public domain to the best of my knowledge. Unlike some web sites, I do not believe that adding HTML mark-up to these docments in any way changes their public domain status. You can re-use individual items without even asking my permission, though courtesy demands you give me credit and a link back to my web site. In the future I will try to better document the sources of public domain items on my web site to make it easier for others to verify the public domain status of these items.