Posts filed under 'News'
Public Domain Works advises users on the copyright status of a particular track to encourage creators and entrepreneurs to build on cultural history.
Let’s say you want to use, sample or reissue a particular track, whether its Elvis, Elgar or Elmore Judd. Reusing even a fraction of a copyright-protected track (without the express permission of the rightsholder) leaves you liable for copyright infringement. At the very least, rights holders can restrain distribution of further copies of the infringing work, or they could sue you for damages.
So before reusing tracks in your documentary or mixtape, its best to be aware of the copyright status of the different works embodied in your chosen track. If the track is public domain then you are free to reuse as you jolly well like - without asking permission from anyone. If its protected, then you should identify the rights holder and ask permission before you reuse.
The tool is only at the alpha stage so far, which means it needs a lot of work before its full launch. The dataset (i.e. tracks which users can query) is limited, the supporting literature is scarce and its largely untested. We are however very excited to improve the tool in collaboration with users, so please leave comments on the blog, email us with bugs and get in touch via the Participate page if you want to get more involved.
August 31st, 2007
The kindly people at BBC Archives have supplied our project with 1.8 gigs (over 1,000,000 items) of data, which includes, in particular, listing of antique recordings. The exact rights status of this data has yet to be determined, so unfortunately for now we can only analyze its contents. Before this analysis, we’ll need to decode its contents via a manual, which decodes the rather obscure short-hand employed at Auntie back when the data was stored…
January 9th, 2007
As of last weekend there is a alpha version of the registry up at:
http://alpha.publicdomainworks.net/
If all went well Tom Chance demoed this at the iCommons summit in Rio de Janeiro.
The database system and its interface is in alpha stage and the site is a prototype designed for testing purposes. In particular:
- This site only contains recordings from the UK for 1900
- The site is based on a wiki. A wiki does not provide a structured enough storage format for the underlying metadata and we need to move to a proper database backend
We need your help both in experimenting with the data and interface and with developing this prototype into a full sytem. To find out how to get involved see participate. If you have comments please post them either here on the registry.
There’s a project on knowledgeforge with all the code:
http://www.knowledgeforge.net/project/pdw/
There’s also a mailing list (discussion, development etc) is:
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/pdb-discuss
June 29th, 2006