I’m working on a EU funded project to look at the size and value of the Public Domain. This involves getting large datasets about cultural material and trying to answer questions like: How many of these items are in the public domain? What’s the difference in price and availability of public domain versus non public domain items? ...
Suppose we have data on cultural items such as books and recordings. For a given item we wish to:
Identify the underlying work(s) that item contains.
Identify the copyright status of that work, in particular whether it is Public Domain (PD)
Putting 1 and 2 together allows us to assign a ‘copyright status’ to a given item. ...
[D]etermining copyright status is, in theory, simple:
Given information on an item match it to a work (or works).
For each work obtain relevant information such as date work first published (as an item) and death dates of author(s)
Compute copyright status based on the copyright laws for your jurisdiction.
While copyright law is not always simple, step three is generally fairly straightforward ...
What is not so straightforward are the first two steps especially step 1. This is because most datasets give only a limited amount of information on the items they contain. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 3/16/2009 12:25:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
