All Open Library contributions are in the public domain. Open Library doesn't assert any copyright or other proprietary rights over any of the material in the Open Library database. Furthermore, most of the material in Open Library cannot be copyrighted as it consists only of facts which are not copyrightable in the US (see Feist v. Rural Telephone Service).

Our records come many sources. Many of them come from the Library of Congress which, as a US Government work, is also in the public domain.