As followers of the mailing list will know we are now planning to join forces with Creative Commons on the Internet Archive’s Open Library project. Our first step is to develop ‘public domain calculators’ for the different jurisdictions across Europe. Here a calculator is just an algorithm for determining whether a given work is Public Domain. Initially this algorithm can just be in the form of flow-chart, as exemplified by this chart for Canada, but eventually it should end up as code like this.
November 20th, 2007
Last Tuesday 17th April i went to my first Own-It event - ‘Dead or Alive: Whose art work is up for grabs?’ - and was very happy to see a roomful of artists and creative types discussing the ins and outs of copyright law.
I was however kinda surprised to hear their IP-expert solicitor use the phrase ‘public domain’ to indicate something entirely different to our use. He did not use the phrase to indicate an intellectual creation free from legal restraint but rather to indicate the inverse of private, as in publicly available works; works that have been published. Then an audience member asked about the rights-status of works in the ‘public domain’, and the expert answered with reference to published works, suggesting he did not associate the term with freedoms.
Seems the legal profession do not understand the term ‘public domain’ in the same way our community does, something which had not occurred to me. Guess i figured it was a recognised legal concept, whereas its more an emerging notion. Should we then revise our project name before going public?
April 20th, 2007
We’ve been busy hacking away and as a result we now have some rough statistics:
Composers whose works are out of copyright. Of the 1083 composers listed in the data kindly donated to us by Philip Harper we estimate that, as of January 1st 2007:
- Out of Copyright: 263
- In Copyright: 762
- Status Unknown: 58
Musicbrainz coverage. Basic querying of musicbrainz indicates that they have the following number of releases per year:
- 106 releases between 1957 -1958,
- 103 releases between 56-57
- 59 releases between 55-56
- 32 release between 54-55
- 23 for 53-54
- 15 for 52-53
- 14 for 51-52
- 9 for 50-51
- 7 for 49-50
- 35 for 1939 to 1949
- 36 for 1919 to 1939
- 7 for 1800 to 1919
Combining these together just shows what a need there is to have a project like this: there are lots of composers whose works are out of copyright but very few of the out-of-copyright recordings of their works are available.
March 25th, 2007
Many moons ago I came across:
http://www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/
Which has lots of data on authors, books and composers (the guy seems to be transcribing a large amount of the US copyright register by hand!).
In the light of our work on the db I wrote to the owner of the site at the start of May and, to my slight surprise, got an immediate response (email addresses on websites are usually dead due to spam). Philip Harper who runs the site was extremely helpful and while not able to make available the general author data as he is planning a semi-commercial collaboration with it he was happy to provide us his composer list as public domain data. I have now posted this up here:
http://project.knowledgeforge.net/pdw/Composers.txt
Details of the License for the Data
From Philip Harper’s email:
Rufus Pollock wrote
Also, just for clarity what license would you make available under? (Public Domain, CC Attribution, etc)
It’s so small, and by the time you get anywhere worthwhile it’ll be so small a component, that it’s not worth making any reservations, so straight Public Domain - do whatever you like with it, without attribution or other conditions, and if you can make money out of it, good luck!
May 25th, 2006
