There are many potential business opportunities that you can launch with public domain works. Religion/Philosophy, The Arts, and Music are some of the popular categories where the public domain is very strong, where you can find your own niche within and build a thriving money-making business out of it.

The core process here is to brainstorm – once you understand what the public domain is about and get a clear idea of the sort of information available in the public domain, you can then sit down and brainstorm the different sort of niches suitable for public-domain driven businesses.

Here, instead of finding a business idea first and then finding the right public domain resources, we will look at finding public domain works and creating businesses out of them. But, you'll need to make sure that the right market exists for any of these topics before you start running with the idea!

Religion & Philosophy

Religion is a sensitive topic for most people, and is bound to be controversial. That being said, there are a lot of public domain works concerned with religion, and commentaries on various faiths and critical issues in history and specific religions are very popular. As with any business venture, take care to evaluate the profitability of a particular idea before setting up a business, but in this case you can easily create both information sites and info-products.

Philosophy has an equally important position in the public domain, and like religious issues has a constant following of search engine traffic. The trick is, of course, to find the right niche and plant your flag on it.

The Arts

Interest in the Arts is a potential goldmine, if only because of the almost ridiculous amounts of money spent on paintings. From Sotheby to Louvre to backroom agreements, there is definitely a lot of money involved in this niche.

The only problem is, how can you use the public domain to make the money train stop at your doorstep? Simple. Build information packages on artists and their work and sell them through your website. This is a hugely untapped niche – while there may be a lot of competition in this area, many of these websites are old and not optimized for search engines, meaning that with proper SEO and marketing you can easily gain good search engine rankings.

Music

Classical music has a dedicated following – but what's even better for you as an entrepreneur is the wealth of information ABOUT the musicians and their music in the public domain. Use this information, target the classical buffs and voila- you have contact.