Philosophy

We want books to be free. That is, free of copyright.
In the public domain.
Belonging to everyone in the world.

Inspiration for laniakea books comes from childhood. When I was a kid I learned there is this thing called patents. If you think of something first, the story goes, you can force everyone else to pay just because you told the official office that it was you who thought of it first. Ridiculous; I thought. There is no way this is true.

Then, as a kid still, I learned about this other thing called intellectual property. That story is, if someone writes a song or a book or anything else that is a form of concepts, then whoever wants to do something with it needs to ask for permission from them. This includes changing it but also even sharing it or giving it away. This can’t be true, I thought again. How can one limit me from singing a song at the park I heard earlier?

Today, I am still of the same mind. Intellectual property doesn’t make sense. What makes sense is to stop trying to limit ideas about ideas. What makes sense is for all intangible creations of the human intellect to be free.

Theodore
founder of laniakea books

What is the Public Domain?

Public Domain is a category of creative works in which no intellectual property law applies. Works in the Public Domain are not owned by any persons, groups of persons, companies, countries, or organisations of any kind.

Anyone can use, change, distribute for both commercial and noncommercial purposes works in the Public Domain without any permission. In other words, we could claim Public Domain works belong to everyone in the world.

Read more at the websites of Creative Commons: CC0 and Wikipedia: Public domain.

About our name

Laniakea means “open skies” or “immense heaven” in Hawaiian. We take our name from the Laniakea Supercluster, which is the cluster of galaxies that is home to our galaxy, the Milky Way, along with ~100,000 other galaxies.